The day Franklin Roosevelt died, one reporter turned to another and said: “Now we’ll have to grow up.” The same might be said with the departure of George W. Bush. The era of Bush-bashing is over, and now we’ll have to grow up and start thinking seriously about a whole set of issues that don’t lend themselves to easy or even morally coherent solutions.
Take the detainee base at Guantánamo. Last Thursday Barack Obama signed an executive order that will close the prison within a year. Approval was worldwide — hardly a surprise since the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners at Gitmo and elsewhere has been subjected to a steady barrage of (deserved) criticism for several years now. Here, for example, is a list of only some of the books reviewed in the Book Review that have reported on the Bush-Cheney excesses:
