Former Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, may have made a misstep or two, but I honestly don't remember when that happened. Instead, he consistently makes sense in his foreign policy pronouncements. I find his judgment unerring. Today he wrote another sensible column from which the following excerpt is taken:
Former President George W. Bush's mistakes resulted from sleep-walking
away from conservative values, whereas President Obama openly
repudiates them, both believing in and fully understanding what he is
doing. Accordingly, conservatives need engage in no "agonizing
reappraisals" of their fundamental views. They need to adjust to being
in opposition, but that is the purest kind of opportunity, not a
burden. Mr. Obama's wearying and unpresidential refrain of blaming his
predecessor is implicitly a trap, an effort to entice us to reflexively
defend the Bush administration. Instead, we should forthrightly explain
where Mr. Bush went wrong, when he did, repudiating his errors as
cheerily as Mr. Obama does, and then, agreeably to conservative
principles, just as cheerily critiquing Mr. Obama's even more egregious
mistakes.
John R. Bolton is currently a
senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the
2007 book Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United
Nations and Abroad.