Dubya’s Reemergence

[Geee]

American Spectator:

 

The opening, on May 1, at Southern Methodist University, of the $250 million George W. Bush Presidential Center will further the discussion (or slugfest, whichever) in ways both predictable and unexpected. This is what happens, is it not, when individuals, however highly placed, seek to direct the course of public conversation.

(Actually I’m worn out on the word “conversation,” due to its overuse by national leaders and pundits who intend, we always learn, to do most of the talking themselves, content that the rest of us should grunt knowingly from time to time.)

Whatever hum of voices arises from the Bush Center—the newest feature of my neighborhood in Dallas—should find ready listeners, if only because what’s on display in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere for “conversational” purposes has so loud and dark and sinister an edge.

Public discontent with George W. Bush, before his administration closed up shop in January 2009, was high and rising. The housing market had collapsed; unemployment was growing fast, along with a deficit swollen by the ambitious new government programs of “compassionate conservatism,” from a Medicare prescription drug benefit to No Child Left Behind. There was likewise the matter of a couple of foreign wars we had initiated without hard-and-fast plans for winding them up. Nothing seemed to be working at the time the 43rd president of the United States skipped town, as it were, resuming the good life he had led in Texas.