Bush-loathing scholar Andrew Bacevich has taken to the Boston Globe to pen a screed documenting the horrible misdeeds perpetrated by the administration. Bacevich even ordered his complaints in a tidy little list:
First of all, I don’t concede all of Bacevich’s points and consider some of them pretty darn obtuse. But just for the sake argument, let’s say that I agree with his list in its entirety (which once again, I don’t). Generally speaking, I’m the first to mention what is to me the inconvenient fact that the president and his minions have made oodles of errors. Okay, I’m not the first – with a lefty blogosphere constantly on outrage patrol, how could I be? But even with the all the Bushie missteps, can we not acknowledge one accomplishment that is far from “entirely malignant?” Since 9/11, there has not been a terrorist attack on American soil. Surely Bacevich has noticed this. And surely he understands that it isn’t the kindness of the Jihadist soul that has made this happen. Some on the left argue that the multiple Bush depredations to our civil liberties etc. haven’t been worth the increase in safety. At least this is an intellectually honest argument. I would even encourage the people making such an argument to bring it before the electorate in November. It wold be great if they quantify their thinking with some metrics, e.g., “I would be willing to allow x 9/11’s as a tradeoff for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.” Bacevich’s argument, oddly enough, is actually the fundamentally frivolous one. By failing to assess the accomplishments of the past eight years and what role the administration had in them, he beclowns himself. By failing to take into account a level of success regarding homeland security that no one foresaw some seven years ago, he implies that future administrations should ignore the Bush administration’s legacy even in an area where it is undeniably strong.
