The incomparable and sometimes indefensible Anne Coulter hits it out of the ballpark in her column today. Those of us who work in liberal land have learned that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to our sitting President, as the feeblest of defenses often leads to one's interlocutor forcibly removing handfuls of hair from his or her own pate while gesticulating wildly and frothing at the mouth. Don't believe me? It even has a name: Bush Derangement Syndrome.
My reticence has nothing to do, then, with my feelings toward W. Simply put, he has been a most misunderestimated leader. Yes, he has disappointed. But he has, nonetheless, kept us safe. As I am fond of thinking, every jihadi who died in Iraq is one less on the streets of San Francisco. But that's a simplistic way of characterizing an entire administration.
But back to Anne Coulter who in her incisive way zeroes in on the laudable in the very epithet so often used to put down the President:
George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.
That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.
OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.
I am old enough to remember the contempt heaped upon Reagan while he was in office. The verdict of history is often not the same one pronounced by contemporaries.
The entire column here.
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