El Ojo del Lago

THUNDER ON THE RIGHT

By Paul Jackson

Let’s tie President Harry Truman’s experience to that of President George W. Bush and ponder how long it will be before an objective and fair assessment is made of Bush just as was later made of Truman. 

When Truman left office in 1953 his popularity was among the lowest of many presidents before him, but now he’s regarded as one of the most perceptive and finest presidents of the 20th century. On leaving office himself, Bush had been so scorned by the fraudulently-named ‘Liberal’ Left that the general climate against him was one of revulsion.

Yet what is seemingly unfolding now may well eventually show that like Truman, Bush was a president of prescience and courage, and as with Truman he changed the world for the better. Bush believed if democracy could be achieved in just one Muslim country in the Middle East it could spread like wildfire to country after country, toppling the sheik despots and dictators who reign and suppress their own nations, and bring freedom to hundreds of millions of people, and end the loathsome subjugation of  women.

Well, democracy has almost been built in Iraq, and newspaper headlines tell day-by-day of the surge of unprecedented protests and rebellions in other Muslin nations run by corrupt fanatics. President Hosni Mubarak has already fallen in Egypt, and so has Zine el-Abidine Ben-Ali in the North African country of Tunisia. The treacherous Moammar Gadhafi is finished in Libya.  Syria’s Bashar Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh cling to power amidst chaos.

Truman was surely a gutsy fellow who didn’t give a darn or a damn what anyone thought of him: So he dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forced the Japanese into submission, instituted the Truman Doctrine to contain Soviet Communism from spreading from the captive Eastern European states to Western Europe, forged the Marshall plan to rebuild Western Europe and prevent its voters from falling for communist malarky, and put in place loyalty checks and oaths for public office holders in the USA, thereby tossing thousands of communist sympathizers out on their rear-ends. A noble move. After all, they had vowed to overthrow the democratically-elected government of the USA by “violent means” if necessary.

Again, the so-called Liberal-Left tried to paint President Ronald Reagan - who wouldn’t listen to this nonsense about detente with Moscow  - the Kremlin’s real aim was world domination - as a dimwitted fool - but Reagan just went out and destroyed the Soviet Union and freed hundreds of millions of people in the Kremlin’s Eastern European slave states. Now, no one mocks Reagan.

Reagan, like Truman and Bush, knew one doesn’t handle one’s enemies with namby-pamby kid gloves. One follows President Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy: “Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far.”

Coincidentally, Bush is already a hero across Africa for his campaign to stop the spread of AIDS and help those afflicted with this dreaded disease. I’m for the likes of Roosevelt, Truman, Reagan and Bush - and for the coming positive re-assessment of George W. Bush.
How about you?

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