OP-ED: Nothing Became Bush like Leaving (Independent.ie, IRELAND)

George Bush most certainly will not go down in history as one of the great American presidents. When he vacates office next week, he will leave his country in one of its worst-ever economic and financial crises and with its standing in the world at its lowest point in decades.

That, naturally, is not how he sees himself. At his final press conference yesterday, he made a stout defence of his record. With that he mingled acknowledgment of some of his most egregious mistakes -- and a touch of humour when he mocked one of his own notorious verbal blunders, telling reporters that they "misunderestimated" him.

The nearest he came to an apology was a reference to the appalling mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. He does not appear to understand fully the import of the more serious mistakes which he admitted.

He knows he was wrong to claim "Mission Accomplished" when the worst chapters of the Iraq tragedy were still in the future. He does not know how misguided he was in the whole enterprise. And he has not repudiated the absurd description of North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as "an axis of evil". They never formed an axis of any kind.

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