Assessing the Bush Legacy: James Fallows on the President's Isolation

President George W. Bush gave his last news conference yesterday. AltTulsa missed it (gotta make a living, after all) but we did see some of the clips as well as the political response.

It wasn't pretty. Writing at The Atlantic.com, James Fallows had this pointed comment:

On matters of policy, he revealed himself to be as isolated and out of touch as his critics (including me) would have assumed all along. Two illustrations: he hotly challenged the premise of one question that his policies had made America less prestigious and respected around the world, saying that was just the view of some "elites" and other pantywaists in part of Europe. Go to China! he said. They still respect us there. Yes, sort of. As I've written many times in the Atlantic, China does not seem in any deep way "anti-American," and they generally think US-China relations are good. But no thinking person has the slightest doubt that the Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib policies, in particular, have hurt America's image badly here as they have in most other places. To say what the President did indicates how carefully he has been protected from any unfiltered feedback from the real world.