Well, now my e-mail box is kicking.

I’m sorry, but I disagree. It is not George Bush’s fault. Was it Ronald Reagan’s fault that the liberals were on the wrong side of the cold war? Was it Reagan’s fault they pushed for a nuclear freeze? No. These people would saying the same stuff no matter what George Bush did.

Me: This sort of makes my point for me. Obviously, the forces of jackassery arrayed against Reagan were great, but he also managed to keep the people on his side. There were tough times and dips in the polls and all that, but at the end of the day Reagan earned and kept the loyalties of millions of Americans who would call themselves liberal on most issues. Yes, he had moderate and conservative Congressional Democrats to work with and there are precious few of them left today. But Reagan’s political burden was hardly light, yet his successes were huge and his legacy was such that it constrained and defined the politics of the next decade and a half and beyond.

As for the issue of liberal good faith made in the earlier post, I think there’s enough truth to defend the proposition in a debate. But it fails the real world test. I know liberals who supported the war. I know liberals even today who hope we win in Iraq (even as they battle with the cognitive dissonance of hoping Bush loses at everything he does). I think there is an irredeemably anti-American left out there. I don’t believe liberals share those sentiments or ideas, they merely foolishly have too much sympathy or admiration for radicals. The hard left wants to dismantle the alleged American Empire. The liberals just want to play nice with everyone and do nice things. I’m being glib, but I think people understand the distinction.

Back to Bush: I still haven’t read the Goldsmith book since we discussed it yesterday, but the point he apparenly makes about Bush not including Congress in national security is a good one by my lights. Again there are reasons for this — some of them very good. For example, inheriting a narrowly Republican House and a teeter-tottering Senate combined with a Democratic Party smoldering over the Florida recount, made a partisan Congressional strategy reasonable. Dick Cheney’s agenda of restoring the prerogatives of the Executive Branch was valid, but the strategy he adopted to accomplish it was problematic.

But, at the end of the day it seems to me you don’t measure a presidency by the list of good excuses for it’s coming up short. I did not blame everything on George W. Bush in my column. Far from it. I said that he is also to blame for the current state of affairs. It seems axiomatic to me that this is so. For if he is not to be accorded any blame, then in effect you are saying he is blameless, and that strikes me as insupportable position, one a majority of Americans and Bush himself would reject.