As he steps into the shadows that come with retirement, some commentators are wont to excoriate him, blaming him for every ill that currently engulfs his great nation.
Notwithstanding this critique, the fact remains that this president has compiled a splendid record -- in foreign aid, particularly battling the global pandemic of HIV-AIDS.
For our part, we are convinced that while there is still far to go in the fight against HIV-AIDS, no one should seek to diminish what the Bush administration has done.
We are today absolutely certain that the George W. Bush who is currently preparing to find the exit that leads in the direction of Crawford, Texas is not the George W. Bush who was both privileged and burdened with serving an America that was at war against terrorism.
We are also certain that today’s George W. Bush is – after a myriad of facts – a sadder and wiser man. In and of itself, this is not exceptional – many a man is wiser after the fact.
But yet again, the fact remains that there is in some instances no second chance. Life is what it is.
This being the case, today we wish to underscore a point that some might -in this time of euphoria- wish to forget; namely one of George W. Bush’s truly great success stories.
This story has to do with his commitment to do something that was tangible and real in the world wide fight against HIV-AIDS.
As Paul Riede and Fred Fiske note, "…The personal commitment from the president has been extraordinary. The $15 billion marshaled over the past five years is the largest U.S. effort ever to lead an international campaign against a disease, according to Ambassador Mark Dybul, the State Department's global AIDS coordinator…"
The conclusion to the matter is dramatic. As Riede and Fiske put it, "Thanks to all these efforts, the rate of HIV infection has dropped 15 percent in Uganda, 23 percent in Zimbabwe, 30 percent in Kenya. Receptive new African leaders have advanced the program, Dybul noted. South Africa, where HIV/AIDS was once stigmatized and demonized, now has the largest treatment program in the world."
So there it goes, we must give credit where credit is due.
Now that we have paid due respects to man who is in the process of debarking his nation’s ship of state, we welcome another captain.
This new man is Barack Hussein Obama.
Today as the whole wide world now knows, the people of the United States of America –in free and fair elections- have catapulted this African-American man to the pinnacle of power in his country.
Indeed, some of his closest living relatives [aside from his two daughters] currently reside where they have always lived – in Kenya.
So it is that the president-elect of the greatest nation in the history of the world is a child of Africa and America – a living bridge if ever there was one such human being who could be so readily and appropriately identified as such.
Today we exult in this victory, wish him and his great country well.
By the same token, it would be mightily churlish on our part were we not to make the point that Obama succeeds another president, George W. Bush.
As the world knows, this scion of wealth and power did not have the easiest time in office. In the first instance his was a presidency that was marred from the get-go – with no end of allegations and innuendo of wrong-doing and chicanery as chorus and backdrop to his first term in office.
Thereafter he had to contend with the dreadful reality of a war on terrorism that began on a sunny blue morning in September on the eleventh day of what was fated to be but the beginning of a dreadful era.
Indeed, we are to this day absolutely convinced that some of America’s more intrepid enemies managed by their daring and their brutally brazen audacity to ‘spook’ the Bush regime – thus their exaggerated responses to the problem.
Thereafter the horror stories – inclusive of Abu Ghraib and Guantamo- proliferated; and as they did, the U.S. economy deteriorated.
At the same time, American soldiers bled and died in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Closer to home other crises were being birthed and generated.
These concerned issues like crime, unemployment, America’s de-industrialization and an incipient meltdown of the nation’s financial systems.
As we know, the contagion has now spread to the rest of the world.
Evidently, Barack Obama – as the saying goes – has his work cut out for him.
It is just so sweet to be alive in these powerful days of hope and change.
