{"id":395,"date":"2009-01-05T14:27:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T18:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/01\/05\/proud-of-w\/"},"modified":"2009-01-05T14:27:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-05T18:27:00","slug":"proud-of-w","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/01\/05\/proud-of-w\/","title":{"rendered":"Proud of W."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the latest issue, Fred Barnes at the conservative Weekly Standard offers one of the sadder, most reality-divorced assessments of the Bush presidency yet penned.<\/p>\n<p>The title is &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/015\/974rbirz.asp\">The End of the Line<\/a>,&#8221; which is a pretty fair place to begin for the story of a man who presided over two disastrously-managed wars, an epic economic crash, and a bungled emergency response that helped cripple a major American city.<\/p>\n<p>Oh &#8211; and Mr. Bush also helped to shred the Republican Party, one of the most important civic institutions in America.<\/p>\n<p>But writing about a lunchtime meeting with the President (Mr. Bush ate a grilled-cheese sandwich), Mr. Barnes suggests that much of the public anger is the result of irrational, &#8220;left-wing haters.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is a popular meme these days in the right-leaning blogosphere: <\/p>\n<p>Mr. Bush wasn&#8217;t a great president.  But the harshest criticism of his tenure is nothing more than an irrational echo of the anti-Clinton rhetoric that bubbled up during the 90s.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a huge fan of Bill Clinton, but please.  His many personal failings aside, Mr. Clinton left America more prosperous and more peaceful than he found it. <\/p>\n<p>Even allowing for the terrible challenges posed by 9\/11, Mr. Bush simply can&#8217;t make that claim.  His own former allies have acknowledged that he wasn&#8217;t up to the job.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Mr. Barnes closes with this rosy assessment of the President&#8217;s eight years in the Oval office:  &#8220;He&#8217;s proud of what he achieved. And proud he should be.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the latest issue, Fred Barnes at the conservative Weekly Standard offers one of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}