When Ellen DeGeneres recently chummed it up with former President George W. Bush, it caused a reaction, to say the least.
The public was surprised DeGeneres, a gay paragon of kindness and tolerance, would mingle with the man who actively tried to ban gay marriage during his presidency and constructed lie after lie to start a war in which tens of thousands of people suffered and died.
DeGeneres addressed the controversy on her show, admitting “… I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different. And I think that we’ve forgotten that that’s OK that we’re all different.”
This advice is the epitome of the left’s brand of tolerance, the thing we embrace and eat up with a giant spoon — then ask for seconds. Many warmly praised Ellen’s feel-good advice, including celebrities.
However, others were not so forgiving. Some criticized DeGeneres for ignoring that Bush was a warmonger who also made deliberate choices, under the guise of religious principles, that made life harder for LGBT people.
I admit that I appreciated Ellen’s warm fuzzies. But as I thought about it, the more questions it raised.
I realized that not only would I not freely socialize with Bush at a party; I wouldn’t even shake his hand. He lied to start a war.
A WAR.
The heavens trembled with the wailing and lamentations of his victims, whose only crime was that they lived on the other side of a man-made border.
Bush is a war criminal, even judging by the standard that all presidents have hands thickly stained with the blood of innocents.
He’s a war criminal even when you consider the presidential job description specifically confers the momentous responsibility of sending people off to kill, and possibly die trying.
He’s a war criminal even though we know presidents authorize numerous covert actions around the world, possibly including murder, for political reasons.
If Bush had killed someone in the Oval Office, he would be prosecuted for the crime of murder.
So why do so many shrug off his obvious war crimes? Because he possessed the lofty title of “president” and committed his crimes from a distance?
Should there be a different standard for judging presidents from how we judge the general population?
Yes, probably, simply because of the unique weight and responsibility of the job. But if so, where do we draw the line?
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” President Barack Obama said at an Obama Foundation summit. “People who do really good stuff have flaws.”
Forget about shaking Bush’s hand; I would hug Obama for hours if he let me. Obama tried to unite the country during his term and made a point of including and accepting others who had different viewpoints. I admire his genuine sense of empathy for others and his compassion for humanity.
I was moved when he cried after Sandy Hook, and sang “Amazing Grace” at a reverend’s funeral.
But let’s not forget that as president, he authorized near-constant drone strikes for years against terrorist targets in the Middle East, with full knowledge that innocents would end up dead as collateral damage.
If people who do really good things have flaws’, does authorizing murder by drone count as a “flaw?”
And knowing this, why do I and so many others still admire Obama so much, but despise Bush?
Contrast this situation with President Jimmy Carter, who didn’t declare an outright war during his presidency, but he either tacitly or openly support human-rights-abusing regimes around the world — in Guatemala, East Timor and Angola to name just a few. Many innocent people around the world suffered wretched tribulations as a direct result of his actions — or inactions.
But since leaving office, Carter has done the most of any other president to redeem himself in the eyes of the world. Working through the Carter Center he has helped to almost eradicate the dreaded Guinea worm in Africa, which caused untold long-term suffering for millions of people. He has promoted conflict resolution and human rights around the world, and has done a tremendous amount of hands-on work building homes for the underprivileged through Habitat for Humanity.
He’s living proof that people who have flaws can also do really good things.
I don’t know if there’s anything that Bush can do to redeem himself in the public eye.
But he couldn’t go wrong if he followed Carter’s example.