American President Pleads Guilty to Hopeless Idealism
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: June 18, 2008

LONDON

President Bush was in one of his oddly chipper moods when he arrived for
dinner with Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street on Sunday night.

Maybe he was excited by the prospect of sharing some Gloucestershire beef,
Yorkshire pudding and fruit trifle with a world leader more unpopular than
he is.

Maybe he was happy to be having dinner with Rupert Murdoch and a covey of
British historians who might agree with his contention to London 's Observer
that "there's no such thing as objective short-term history." Just in case,
though, the group dwelled on the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and didn't
talk about the 21st. And presumably, over the 1934 brandy that W. eschewed,
the historian

Simon Schama did not repeat his 2006 assessment that the president was an
"absolute [expletive] catastrophe" or his analysis that long before Mr. Bush's
militant missionary work in the Middle East, Europe had regarded the moral
rhetoric of America as a cover for self-interest.