Aaron Goldstein writes at National Review Online about liberals’ changing views about former President George W. Bush.
When George W. Bush speaks, liberals are sure to react. But then Bush defended freedom of the press in an interview with the Today show’s Matt Lauer:
“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy. We need the media to hold people like me to account. Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive, and it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power.” The 43rd president also said that “we need all the answers” concerning possible Russian efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. …
… Liberals reacted very differently to George W. Bush than they ever they have before. Here’s a sample from Twitter:
Star Trek icon George Takei: “You know things are bad when George W. Bush starts sounding like a member of the Resistance.”
Former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom: “I am typing these words: President George W. Bush is right. Freedom of the press is ‘indispensable to democracy.’”
Glenn Greenwald: “2005: George W Bush is a pillaging, torturing war criminal who let a city drown.
2017: I may have disagreed with Bush but he was A Good Man™.”
Jedd Legum, editor, ThinkProgress: ”When did George W. Bush become a voice of reason?”
It wasn’t so long ago that liberals routinely claimed that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said that he had had advance knowledge of 9/11, and compared him to Hitler.
These developments remind me of Mark Twain’s apocryphal quote about his father: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” Could it be that liberals have finally grown up? In the case of George W. Bush, liberals are astounded at how much he’s learned in eight years.
