The Weekend Australian features an article called "What Went Right", in which Greg Sheridan argues that "history will judge Bush much more kindly than today's commentators do".
Already I see Greg Sheridan is joining the journalists at Quadrant in rewriting the history of the Bush Presidency ("What Went Right", The Weekend Australian, Weekend Inquirer, p 15, Jan 17-18). As time goes on, the facts and details can be forgotten and Bush can become the hero of Iraq and the free world that his spin doctors always said he was.
Contrary to Sheridan's article, many of us never believed that Bush or Powell believed there were WMDs in Iraq or that it was justified to make a pre-emptive strike, killing millions. Sheridan points to Bush's aid to Africa but ignores the demands for abstinence only sex education in a continent ravaged by AIDS. Sheridan even goes so far as to try to convince us that there was "never support" in the US for signing Kyoto, seemingly under the belief that Bill Clinton's opinion is the only one that counts. Then of course there have been the disastrous neo-liberal economic policies and significant failures on health, education and Hurricane Katrina. Bush is unlikely to be considered a particularly remarkable historical figure because he did little with his time apart from an unsuccessful war campaign, but if journalism is the first draft of history, Greg Sheridan is busy writing the second draft.