The old narrative about George W. Bush was that he was a bloodthirsty war monger who sent us into war in Iraq by telling lies about WMDs to enrich his oil baron buddies and let New Orleans drown because he hates black people. The new narrative about Dubya is that he is a wise, moderate elder statesman who would never do any of those terrible things that Donald Trump is doing. The conclusion about the strange new respect that the younger Bush is getting comes in a Wall Street Journal piece by Kim Strassel. The left had finally bought into the “Miss me yet?” meme that everyone else did when Obama was in power.
Mind, Bush never deserved the grief he got while the president and, let’s face it, he is far more of a gentleman that Trump ever could be. One could never imagine Bush engaging in midnight tweeting to excoriate his enemies in quite the same way that the current president has.
President Reagan got some of the same treatment. During his presidency, the Gipper was a mad man who despoiled the poor, gave gay people aids, and was hell bent on destroying the planet in a thermonuclear war. That narrative began to change about the time the Berlin Wall fell followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only the most fervent leftist now denies that Reagan’s policies won the Cold War and lifted the threat of nuclear obliteration from the planet.
Both Bushes have gained strange new respect in retrospect. Just as people now note that Bush the Younger didn’t say alarming things like Trump, back in the 1990s people realized that Bush the Elder did not chase interns around the Oval Office like Clinton did.
Donald Trump is likely to get strange new respect as well. One wonders what President Ted Cruz is going to do in 2030 that will cause people to get nostalgic about the Trump years when we had a president who was plain spoken, thought outside the box to fix the economy, defeat terrorism, and take Americans back to the moon. Past Republican presidents are as much loved as current ones are hated.
