From Up North, Two Dubya Appreciations

Canada's National Post offers opinion from two columnists who, like SWNID, think Dubya a better POTUS than his legion of detractors allow in their perpetual imitation of one another.

Conrad Black, whose conviction on fraud certainly induces contrarian thinking, notes many salient achievements, a couple of which we quote:

The U.S. annual economic growth rate has been 2.2% through this presidency, the highest of any advanced country, and the economy expanded 19% in this time, well ahead of other large economies. The same pattern was replicated in per-capita income and spending, investment of all kinds and unemployment, which ran at half a percent below the average of the Clinton years and three full points below the Eurozone. . . .

Bush’s treaty with India, creating an alliance with that country, is one of the most important diplomatic initiatives in the world since Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. But the chief preoccupation of the Bush administration has been the conflict with terrorists and terrorism-promoting states. All who remember 9/11 will recall the very high concern that, as bin Laden promised in his belligerent videos at the time, there would be imminent and frequent sequels. Yet not so much as a firecracker has gone off in the Americas since then, and President Bush deserves much credit that he has not received for this fact.

Similarly David Frum notes some blessed Bushisms, including such seldom-noted achievements as the training of Indian security forces, significant progress against narco-kleptocracy in Colombia, the immediate and effective discouragement of hate crimes against Muslims in the US after 9/11, and the snuffing out new intifada-style uprisings from Palestinians.

All this gives us occasion to rant out a complaint: we are personally exhausted to the point of despair over all the pronouncements that the present economy is the worst since Herbert Hoover was President. With unemployment still at historically low levels, this recession looks set to be one of the shallowest in a series of increasingly shallow recessions since the early 1980s. When shallow recessions are dubbed worst ever, we think it isn't just the recessions that are shallow.