Reflecting on his final days as Fox News’ Washington managing editor, Brit Hume tells the Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin that when people look back at the Bush era, they “will be a lot kinder to this president than the current scribes are being.” “It’s really turned out to be a very consequential presidency,” said Hume, adding that Bush has put America on an “amazing” foreign policy path:
Even the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which is widely regarded as terrible White House bungling, is a much more complex story than that which eventually will be told. And while people are understandably focused on the length and the casualty count of the war, at some point they’ll consider the policy path on which this president has placed us. It’s a very different one, and an amazing one. We’re pushing for democracy everywhere, not just playing ball with friendly dictators as we did in the Cold War.
One thing that Hume is right about is the fact that historians currently view Bush’s presidency as “a combination of many negative factors.” According to CNN, historians currently say that “incompetent” will most likely be the word used to describe Bush.
Update:
As Matt Duss noted in June, Bush has effectively abandoned his “democracy agenda” because of regional destabilization resulting from the Iraq war.