Whenever I try to be a snobby pundit, which is a lot of the time, I end up sounding kinda stupid.

I read this article that I guess is trying to say what the title of the article says, that W. wasn’t so bad after all.  

I had to say “I guess” that’s what the article is trying to say, because I wasn’t sure what it said after reading it carefully twice.

I always regretted not being born 10 years earlier.  I thought all the cool stuff to have been involved in had already happened.  

I no longer have that regret or opinion.  The most important stuff to have been involved in, after the French Revolution, happened post 9-11.

I think that W was a tragic failure.  And by tragic I don’t mean a literary tragedy.  I mean that his presidency was literally filled with events “characterized by extreme distress and sorrow”.  (My periods come after the quotation marks.  This is done on purpose but I’m not making a statement.  As usual, I didn’t know any better and someone pointed it out.  I told ‘em I prefer the look and feel of it this way.)

Most of what W did, he did wrong.  If it were an issue of forgiveness, I could deal with it better.  But it’s about truth and accuracy, not a moral flaw.  

From 9-11 to Katrina, he flubbed up.  And his failures were made exponentially worse by his arrogant refusal to reverse course after he’d made yet another poor choice.  

He’s a war criminal, and if history forgets this, I’ll remind ‘em.  He was criminally neglectful of the people of New Orleans.  

I couldn’t tell why the author of the article below thinks W. wasn’t so bad.  

I found the article compelling.  I try to forget this stuff and like Michael Corleone, “get sucked back in”.

For what it’s worth:

So George W. Bush isn’t a monster, after all

If you’ve just crash-landed from the planet known as Kepler-186f and have no experience with the human life form or its recent history, let me just clarify something for you: George W. Bush was a divisive and unsuccessful president. Economically, internationally, culturally — you name the category of leadership, and the results pretty much range from disappointment to disaster. A CBS News/New York Times poll clocked Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent, which is about as low as you can go in politics without needing a parole officer.

You may get confused about this, because lately Bush is enjoying a public restoration. The Bush you read about these days is the kind of inclusive conservative you can deal with, a guy who bikes with wounded veterans, a sensitive portraitist of world leaders. A graphic this week on FiveThirtyEight.com showed how fewer and fewer Americans blame Bush for the country’s economic morass, even though his successor, Barack Obama, won two presidential campaigns based on precisely that premise.

Bush’s critics will argue that this is testament to how quickly we forget the past. But it has more to do, really, with how we distort the present.

The truth is that Bush was never anything close to the ogre or the imbecile his most fevered detractors insisted he was. Read “Days of Fire,” the excellent and exhaustive book on Bush’s presidency by Peter Baker, my former colleague at the New York Times. Bush comes off there as compassionate and well-intentioned — a man who came into office underprepared and overly reliant on his wily vice president and who found his footing only after making some tragically bad decisions. Baker’s Bush is a flawed character you find yourself rooting for, even as you wince at his judgment.

But as is the way in modern Washington, it was never enough for Bush’s political opponents that he was miscast or misguided. He had to be something worse than that — or, more precisely, a lot of things worse. He had to be the most catastrophic president ever, in the history of ever. He had to be a messianic war criminal. Or a corporate plant looking to trade blood for oil. Or a doofus barely able to construct a sentence.

That was the way Will Ferrell portrayed Bush in a one-man Broadway show that, for a while after Bush’s departure, thrilled the enlightened set. For a lot of urban Americans, the ones who bought little books of Bush’s mangled syntax at the Barnes & Noble checkout line, Ferrell’s comic version of Bush became more real than the man himself. You know something’s wrong when the most nuanced portrayal of a political figure comes from Oliver Stone.

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