This is all nonsense, according to senior White House officials. They say that Bush isn’t delusional at all and that history will vindicate him, just as it vindicated Lincoln and Truman. ~U.S. News and World Report

But “history” didn’t vindicate them and doesn’t vindicate anybody.  Progressive nationalist historians and historians inclined towards an internationalist perspective in foreign policy have worked at vindicating them ever since their terms ended, and for some reason otherwise intelligent people live their entire lives believing that Lincoln was a successful chief executive and Truman was a great leader of men.  Measured by the standard of whether they left their country better than when they took office, both must be counted as miserable failures, among the worst five to have ever held power in this county (Wilson, FDR and LBJ being the other top contenders).  As much as I dislike Mr. Bush and pretty much all of his works, he is actually not even in their league in terms of the damage he has wrought on this country.  A mediocrity in everything, even his flirtation with tyranny, with which these other men had torrid and passionate affairs, has been unimpressive.   

Truman’s and Acheson’s failure in blundering into the Korean War and then Truman’s failing to win it have not been “vindicated” by anyone–the continued division of Korea along a heavily armed border to this day marks one of the lasting legacies of the Truman Administration (even though, yes, the armistice was signed under Eisenhower).  God forbid that 55 years from now we have a division posted in Kurdistan to guard the border with Greater Iran–such might be Mr. Bush’s “vindication.”  Perhaps by then President Sasha Obama, her popularity plummeting thanks to our continued involvement in the Second Nigerian War, will find herself in some difficulty when she compares herself to that paragon of bold leadership, George W. Bush. 

Had Truman run and somehow been re-elected, despite the most abysmal approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency, it is somewhat questionable whether South Korea would have survived at all.  Had Adlai Stevenson been elected, it is questionable whether we could have held Japan (I exaggerate a little).  Does anyone actually want to be compared with Truman?  Why?

This entire debate is a bit surreal to me, since my test of “great President” is a President who actually follows his oath of office and obeys the Constitution, which Lincoln and Truman were great ones for violating all the time.  Setting aside such quaint notions for a moment so that we can speak in a lingo more familiar to modern helots, Lincoln and Truman did have certain “accomplishments” after a fashion that have certainly been lasting, and so they may be said to have been “great men in history” who shape events.  Lincoln destroyed the constitutional republican Union of states, and Truman permanently and probably fatally subverted the republican nature of our government by committing us to international adventures for what now seems to be perpetuity.  Caesar helped to kill the Roman Republic, but he might at least argue that his hand was forced and he could also claim that he at least won his military engagements.  Pity the empire whose Caesars are men named Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman.  Mr. Bush can only dream to achieve anything as lasting or permanent.  A failure to the end, his Presidency will not even fundamentally change the structures of government that he received from his predecessor.  As much as he is personally ridiculed and despised, he is really not much more than a placeholder President, a cipher, a nonentity.  It is because of this that his profound sense of self-importance and mission is especially disturbing, since even the Lord who chose to make those halting of speech into prophets is not this cruelly ironic.  Sometimes Presidents leave office in disgrace because they were thoroughly bad Presidents through and through, in the sense that they were just really bad at their jobs.  If he is anyone, Mr. Bush is Carter, not Truman.