A tell-tale sign of intellectual shallowness is the belief that the momentary vagaries of fashion and public opinion are permanent. This kind of naiveté is, of course, common among high school and college kids whose life experience is too short to have taught them any better.
Unfortunately, a great many people masquerading as thinking adults are just as callow, with far less excuse. Thus, we have sophomoric articles and blog posts like this one from Shadowfax, who offers the following admixture of smugness and banality:
I am starting to get excited. I’m excited to have Obama take office, and I’m excited to be rid of that pathetic failure of a predecessor. I had planned on writing a long vituperative post explicating the evidence that Bush has been the worst president of my lifetime …
He then links to one of his own posts, wherein he advises that he will “help” history’s judgment with a list of shopworn canards that he apparently cut-and-pasted from Kos or some other bastion of brain-donors. Well, here’s a clue for Shadowfax and the rest of the neurotic Bush bashers:
History doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your infantile opinions. Long after the losers who sputter at their monitors about “neocons” and “theocons” have gone to their pathetic little fates, more serious people will make the call. As Andrew Roberts expresses it in The Telegraph:
History, by looking at the key facts rather than being distracted by the loud ambient noise of the
24-hour news cycle, will probably hand down a far more positive judgment on Mr Bush’s presidency than the immediate, knee-jerk loathing of the American and European elites.
In this, Bush will be in good company. Among the other presidents despised by the pseudo-intellectual poseurs of their day were Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Truman, and Reagan. And, across the pond, Churchill was consistently reviled by the fashion plates of his day.
Bush has his faults, of course, and he has pissed me off on more than one occasion. But I imagine that he will, in the end, triumph over his Lillipudlian critics.
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