Thank you, President Bush

This post at Diakonia, itself a re-post, is an interesting balance to President Obama's inaugural speech.

I am particularly struck by its reference to the welcome that President Bush gave to Pope Benedict XVI when the Pope visited America. I posted on this at the time, and was able to see in it President Bush's study of Deus Caritas Est.

I also noted the following paragraph:

I should like to thank President Bush for his personal decency, manifest in his (unpublicized) personal attention to our wounded and to the families of the fallen; in his refusal to become bitter in the face of outrageous slander; and in his calm amidst tribulations that most of us can’t imagine.

This seems very true given the personal vehemence that could be seen in much anti-Bush protest. I think, for all the rhetoric, we have still to see anything of this courtesy in President Obama. Once we see through the oratory, his inaugural speech was not gentle in some of its implied criticism of President Bush.