Since 1917 there has been one period during which the President of the United States was not one of the 100 (or, for that matter, 10 or 5 or 3) most influential men on Earth. That was while Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke. Though we forget it nowadays, Warren Harding had a great deal of sway (mostly for ill) over what happened in the U.S. and abroad, and Harry S. Truman, at the depths of his unpopularity at home and without majority support in Congress (not even after 1948, if one takes the Southern Democrats into account), was responsible for the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and the Korean War.
It is thus inherently implausible that George W. Bush has less impact on the world than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Osama bin-Laden, Queen Elizabeth or various transient Hollywood celebrities. But the BDS sufferers at the country’s largest circulation infotainment mag really, really, really wish that the President would go away, so they pretend that he doesn’t matter. Critics of the Bush Administration perpetually accuse it of “denial”. Well, here is denial on stilts jumping on a pogo stick.
It’s hardly necessary to refute, much less become indignant over, Time’s silliness. Rather, we should take it as a revelation of the extent to which it has become purely a fiction periodical, designed to deliver to purblind leftists a soothing picture of the week’s events. As Tom Gross puts it, “Don’t go to Time for your foreign news” – or your domestic either. But do look at it if you doubt the proposition that a large proportion of anti-Bush, anti-conservative American opinion lives in a self-constructed parallel universe that has fewer and fewer intersections with the real one.
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