Proving again, that for Bush love means never making a maturely critical statement, the President has decided to
pick a fight with President Clinton over who gets to love the Pope most. Bush fell all over himself trying to praise the pope and snipe at Clinton, who gave a respectful yet honest assessment of the Pope.
Clinton suggested that the Pope "may have had a mixed legacy". He continued...
"There will be debates about him. But on balance, he was a man of God, he was a consistent person, he did what he thought was right," Clinton said. "That's about all you can ask of anybody."
Bush, naturally, took this balanced, yet admiring, take as an insult and quickly set upon refuting it. From the AP Story:
"I think John Paul II will have a clear legacy of peace, compassion and a strong legacy of setting a clear moral tone," Bush told reporters on Air Force One as he flew from Rome to the United States just hours after the funeral. He said he wanted to amend his remarks to add the word "excellent."
"It was a strong legacy," the president said. "I wanted to make sure there was a proper adjective to the legacy he left behind, not just the word clear."
His obsessive interest in adjectives to modify the word "legacy" make it pretty clear that he was trying to engage in a pissing match with President Clinton. On the heels of Bush's
apparent snub of President Carter, it seems to me quite disturbing the way the President is trying to quiet politicize the Pope's death. Or maybe I'm just reading to much into it. This is just Bush's reflexive need to silence all criticism of his point of view. He and his cronies clearly had a less clear view of the Pope when he opposed the Iraq war, after all. Or perhaps its Bush's equally reflexive need for all issues to be expressed as an absolute, even if that absolute changes repeatedly. A mature and mixed approach is "flip-flopping". Changing his opinion repeatedly, but always expressing it strongly is the kind of resoluteness we've come to expect from American's most unpopular President.