"What if he's right?"

LaShawn Barber points us, today, towards an Esquire article written by a liberal making a case for George Bush. Tom Junad's own words:

The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated.

...

If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.

I can buy this man's analysis, although I might disagree with one of his points: his dislike of the President in response to Bush's character. What is valuable is that Junod seeks to seperate his visceral response from the crisis at hand to get at the root problems. In doing so, he compares today's war President with the President who fought the Civil War.

Good stuff. I would that more liberals could do the same.

LaShawn's commentary also provides some insight.

What are you waiting for? Go. Read.