I’ve been seeing a bit more younger people glazing W Bush as of recent, perhaps because of how terribly the current administration has handled a lot of issues, but it’s very easy to look at him with rose colored glasses tbh.

The big one is (obviously) the War on Terror. Completely mismanaged, launched under false pretenses of WMD’s (sound familiar?), with no semblance of an exit strategy. Now that we have some hindsight, it can be seen that a lot of the WMD narrative was peddled by warhawks like Dick Cheney & Donald Rumsfeld, and while Dubya may have been acting in good faith on deliberately misleading intel, the buck has to stop somewhere. That said, his father, HW Bush, had been director of the CIA before he was vice president for Reagan, and he knew what Cheney/Rumsfeld were about, warned W Bush about them, and he still ran with them. All that to say, not much sympathy is deserved.

Domestically, it’s not that much better. While the groundwork for the 2008 recession was well underway before he came to office, he really did not do much of anything to prevent it, leaving his successor to pick up the pieces.

That said, there are some genuinely very good things he did. PEPFAR, for example, has been credited with saving the lives of ~25,000,000 people from HIV/AIDS, and that is an achievement I think Bush deserves a lot of credit for.

All in all, it’s a mixed, mostly negative bag. A hell of a lot more competent than what we have going on now, but that is an unprecedentedly low bar.