'W'--An Alternative View

President George W. Bush gave an impressive farewell address to the nation last evening from the White House. In some ways, I am glad to see him go. But in many other ways, I will miss him.

No doubt anyone who has followed The Liberty Sphere for any length of time knows that I have been one of W's biggest critics, especially since 2006 or so. I was convinced that he began to waffle on his principles at around that point in time.

He made some big mistakes. Sometimes these decisions were based on bad advice offered by people the President wrongly trusted. Sometimes he was just plain stubborn. And sometimes he was just plain wrong.

It was wrong, for example, to set aside his free-market principles to accept a mass of convoluted government bailouts that in the long run will not help the economy at all.

The President was stubborn in his refusal to change course in Iraq and bump up the troop levels in order to stabilize the situation. Once he finally relented and agreed to the troop surge, the War in Iraq turned around dramatically, except by then it was too late for him to get credit for a good job. The American people had already turned against the war.

And the President demonstrated that sometimes his trust was in the wrong people who offered him bad advice. His refusal to grant pardons to agents Ramos and Compean of the Border Patrol is a case in point.

Sure, I blasted the President on issues such as the BAFTE, his growing tendency as the years progressed to forsake his friends in the gun rights movement, and his refusal to deal firmly with Mexico on the immigration problem.

But the President did a lot of things right.

W led the way in securing the nation from further terrorist attacks on our own soil. And the record proves his success...not a single terrorist attack on our own soil since 9/11.

The President appointed Justices to the United States Supreme Court who are decidedly conservative, originalist, and committed to the principles of the Founding Fathers. His appointments to the bench in the federal system have been consistent in providing a counter-balance to the Leftists of the Clinton years.

The U.S. Government's official policies on a myriad of issues related to the sacredness of human life in the realm of abortion and embryonic stem cell research have been golden examples of adherence to solid moral-ethical principles.

We can be assured that NONE of this will be true about the incoming President.

Finally, I have always been a supporter of the President's overall goals in the 'war on terror.' His vision of spreading democratic principles to areas of the world that have never before experienced it is a lesson in courage. His appointment of John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador was nothing less than a stroke of genius. For the first time since the U.N.'s hard turn to the Left, it got an earful of American patriotism and grit in Bolton.

It was a crying travesty of patriotism that the Democrats refused to approve Bolton. Thus, he served the entirety of his time as a 'recess appointment' the President used to get around the stubborn, boneheaded refusal of blind Democrats to approve a good man as our U.N. Ambassador.

And ever since Bolton's departure, we have been much the weaker for it.

And thus, I do not consider the Presidency of George W. Bush a total disaster. Not by a long shot. Bill Clinton was a disaster. Jimmy Carter was a tsunami disaster. These things must be kept in perspective.

While W perhaps will not go down as one of the greatest Presidents, he most certainly will not go down as one of the worst, either.

And, considering what we're getting come January 20, I for one will sorely miss him. And I do believe that at heart he is a good man.