Appreciating George Bush

Ok, this is very interesting. The man so many of us despise may actually have done more good than most American presidents.

In a recent Time Magazine article, entitled Geldof and Bush: Diary from the Road, Bob Geldof writes about how Bush has been more active on the issue of Africa than his predecessors. As he writes:

He is also, I feel, an emotional man. But sometimes he’s a sentimentalist, and that’s different. He is in love with America. Not the idea of America, but rather an inchoate notion of a space — a glorious metaphysical entity. But it is clear that since its mendacious beginnings, this war has thrown up a series of abuses that disgrace the U.S.’s central proposition. In the need to find morally neutralizing euphemisms to describe torture and abuse, the language itself became tortured and abused. Rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib — all are codes for what America is not. America has mortally compromised its own essential values of civil liberty while imposing its own idea of freedom on others who may not want it. The Bush regime has been divisive — but not in Africa. I read it has been incompetent — but not in Africa. It has created bitterness — but not here in Africa. Here, his administration has saved millions of lives.

The article portrays a thoughtful, warm and funny man, a man well aware of how disinterested the media in general are interested in Africa. And, despite all the things many of us have had issues with -the war in Iraq, the creep of fundamentalism into politics, the troglodytic approach to the drug war and sex education, all this may be dwarfed, not ever in perception, but in reality by his work on Africa’s behalf. One would hope for more consistency, a little more love on the home front but nonetheless, it is tragic that he might be forever castigated without the tempering of the knowledge of this initiative.

Credit should be given where credit is due, even if you are George Bush.