The Task of Revisionism
By Miguel Guanipa (02/10/07)
When asked how he thinks history will judge him, President Bush is fond of heckling back his impertinent scoffers by jesting that there are yet many who are still writing about the first president of our country, and he has at least until historians get through covering the many achievements and misadventures of the 42 presidents who preceded him before he has to worry about how he may or may not be judged by those who are entrusted with that honorable task.
A question that liberals don’t ask often enough is rather how history will judge the Democratic wing of the George W. Bush years. But perhaps a better question would be how impartial historians (they are a rare specimen) will judge either.
Since most reality defining institutions today - from the mass media to academia - seem beholden to what is at best a benign contempt and at worst an visceral hatred for the president, the purview of early historians who presumably endeavor to objectively record the feats and foibles of the present administration could very well be unduly influenced by this highly acrimonious spirit of our age, which, if the truth be told, many even today find to be a rather mystifying phenomenon.
It is in the same contrarian mode that Democrats have remained blissfully ignorant of how their globally advertised grievances against the present struggle only echo the emboldened war cries of a tenacious enemy; they have allowed their decisions to be steered primarily by a glaring animus for the president; they have endeavored to cast the mildest critical assessment of the most consequential event of our time, the war on terror - even when offered in a most constructive spirit - as a de facto repudiation of the administration’s entire policy; they have dismissed the perilous exposure of classified information as a constitutionally protected form of free speech; and most significantly, they have opposed virtually every security initiative aimed at protecting our national interests.
We are the firsthand witnesses - though perhaps also the unsuspecting tributaries of a future narrative -of how at every opportunity Democrats have not failed to veil each of their decisions under the pretence of a genuine concern for the violation of civil liberties – which Americans hold sacred - or the necessary antidote against the corrosive effects of overreaching from the executive branch - which no fair minded American approves of- thus ensuring that their actions do not betray the petulant acrimony which actually supports them. Likewise they have successfully portrayed their obstinate rivalry as the kind of healthy dissent that is vital to the survival of a democracy; but they know better than anyone that the easiest way to allow treason entry into the arena of meaningful debate is to drape it in the garment of freedom.
Historians will inescapably have to consider that ours was a time of war, and thus will have to judge to the best of their ability and with the utmost impartiality whether or not the choices made by either Party were consciously designed to expedite or unwittingly accrued to hinder the satisfactory resolution of this struggle. At this juncture I admit to a personal bias of my definition of what constitutes a satisfactory resolution, and that is nothing less than the indefinite quelling or complete annihilation of the terrorist element; in one word: victory.
As historians diligently sort though all of these documented facts, and discern the indelible stamp left by the majority of the Democrats’ rare and unenthusiastic ovations of this administration’s war efforts, coupled with their emblematic obstructionist approach to conflict resolution, they will most likely ascertain, as they commence a sober and impartial record of our times and the epic struggle in which we were presently involved, that most Democrats consistently played the role of a seditious contingency ideologically committed to defeat.
Until then, Democrats can find consolation in the fact that they are presently receiving their reward from sympathetic writers of their age with whom no doubt they find an affinity, and that not unlike the President, they also have another 42 administrations ahead of line before their legacy is posthumously dissected.
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