Opinion: At Last -- Something to Thank You For, George W. Bush

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I have been thinking hard about what I can cherish and treasure from the Bush White House years, one simple thing I have to be thankful to Dubya for, and I have found it.

Perspective. Bush’s Iraq war has given me a sense of scale about money that’s actually relieved me of a lot of worrying and fretting.

One month of the war in Iraq is costing this country an estimated $10 billion dollars. Once you use that as a yardstick, no other expense, no other crisis seems as expensive, as intractable and terrifying as it once did. A $15 billion California budget deficit? No sweat! It’s only six weeks’ worth of war Iraq dollars! The Bear Sterns bailout -- pshaw, that’s only three months in Iraq war dollars. And a possible $40 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? A mere quarterly check for the Iraq war.

So to paraphrase Jack Valenti’s line about Lyndon Johnson in the White House, I now sleep a little better knowing that virtually nothing we might do here at home would cost as much as the Iraq war is costing us already.

The photo of President Bush returning to the White House yesterday from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, is by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.