Two assessments of the Bush presidency

By any normal human reckoning, you would have to call President Obama's selective precis of the George W. Bush presidency, delivered at the dedication of the Bush Library, generous and gracious, First he paid tribute to the man:

So we know President Bush the man.  And what President Clinton said is absolutely true -- to know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin.  He knows who he is.  He doesn’t put on any pretenses.  He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  He is a good man.

Then, to an edited version of his record: 

But we also know something about George Bush the leader.  As we walk through this library, obviously we’re reminded of the incredible strength and resolve that came through that bullhorn as he stood amid the rubble and the ruins of Ground Zero, promising to deliver justice to those who had sought to destroy our way of life...

Historians, raise your shovels

At the groundbreaking of the Bush spin museum, Dick Cheney cracked, "This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

I know of one project for which Americans -- or let us say, American historians -- ought to ready their shovels. That is burying Dick Cheney -- destroyer of this nation's liberties, economy, soft power, hard power --and thousands of its finest men and women, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Even as his ideological brethren place destroying Obama ahead of national and global security.