John Hannah, Patriot

By the time he left office, George W. Bush was hideously unpopular among the American people. Indeed, people hated him so much that the public continues to have extremely low confidence in the political party to which he belonged. Indeed, UFO conspiracy theories are more popular than the Republican Party. But as unpopular as Bush was at home, he was much more unpopular abroad.

Barack Obama’s election has drastically improved the world’s view of America to the extent that the Nobel Committee even saw fit to grant him a premature-seeming Nobel Peace Prize. Under the circumstances, any reasonable representative of American policy would try to emphasize as much as possible that he or she shared the world’s extremely low opinion of Obama’s predecessor and emphasize that whatever you may say about Obama, he’s not George W. Bush. For example Hillary Clinton is a smart woman:

Clinton told the students “there is a huge difference” between the Obama administration’s approach and that of former President George W. Bush. “I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him,” she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. “So to me, it’s like daylight and dark.”

John Hannah, despised and discredited former henchman to Dick Cheney, himself the the most despised and discredit of the many despised and discredited henchmen of the despised and discredited Bush administration, whines in response:

Does anyone advising President Obama and the secretary of state really believe that this kind of partisanship and trash-talking abroad about another American president is really going to buy us much long-term goodwill among either our friends or our adversaries? Do they imagine that this sort of thing really helps to advance U.S. national interests?

To which Mike Crowley offers the only reasonable response of course it will buy us goodwill.

Obviously, though, Hannah can’t really be so dumb as to not realize that there’s enormous, enormous, enormous good will to be gained through bashing the despised and discredited Bush administration. I take it that he savvily realizes that the world’s greatest fear about Obama is that he might not really be all that different from Bush. Hannah’s attacks, however, emphasize the reality of the change and thus improve America’s imagine in the world. So I say—nice work John Hannah!