YOU'RE GONNA MISS HIM WHEN HE'S GONE

David Warren writing in the Ottowa Citizen recently, suggested that the world is going to miss George W. Bush when he leaves office:

Like al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the many other adversaries America and the West must continue to face, the Russians are looking forward to the time after George Bush leaves office. It is assumed that the American electorate has by now tired of playing policeman to the world, and that the next president will be a liberal Democrat, eager to make unilateral concessions, slash military budgets to fund social programs, and cut-and-run from foreign battlefields.

They may well be right...

America is demonized as the "cowboy," going it alone; and Western politicians, especially on the left, score easy points by smugly playing to their domestic anti-American galleries. The lethal enemies of the West cannot help but notice this dynamic, and from car bombings in Iraq, to the rhetoric of Russian and Chinese military commanders, they exploit it to drive further wedges between the U.S. and her allies...

We are caught in a trap. The very success of the Bush strategy, in preventing another major terror strike on the U.S., in confronting and arresting the progress of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere, and also in consolidating the post-Cold War European gains of NATO and the European Union, contributes to an illusion of security in a world that has seldom been such a dangerous place. People forget what alliances require.

Now wouldn't that be something.

YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME WHEN I'M GONE
(GWB singing with Brooks and Dunn)

I'm still hurtin' from the last time
The polls made fun of how I talk;
I can't find much to believe in
You even hate the way I walk
Heaven knows I'm tryin'
To get this war done and won;
Go ahead and diss me--
'Cause you're gonna miss me when I'm gone

Not much chance we're gonna make it
If I'm the only one who's tryin'
You know I'm running out of vetoes
The West is running out of time
Someday, Dems are gonna wake up
And wonder what went wrong
Go ahead and diss me--
'Cause you're gonna miss me when I'm gone

The EU's good at going through the motions
But all we get are alibis
And I get this empty feeling
Are they the best we got for allies?
I don't see them doin' their part here,
They don't know what's going on;
Go ahead and diss me--
'Cause they're gonna miss me when I'm gone

Go ahead and diss me--
'Cause you're gonna miss me when I'm gone

Go ahead and diss me--
'Cause you're gonna miss me when I'm gone