A Silver Lining to the Bush Administration?

Is there anything wrong with a little wishful thinking now and then? In a review of Francis Fukayama's new book "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy" and Bruce Bartlett's "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy" Alan Wolfe, writing in the Chronicle Review indulges: "some future president will be faced with undoing the damage of a man sufficiently lacking in intellectual curiosity to question the bad ideas upon which he built his administration. Academics and intellectuals with an independent cast of mind — whether liberal or conservative — have played little role in the Bush administration, given, as it is, to reiterating talking points and insisting on absolute loyalty to the man in charge. But that is all the more reason why academics and intellectuals will find themselves in great demand when the leaders of this country eventually decide that their foreign and domestic policies will have to confront the real world around them, not the imaginary one bequeathed to them by their ideology. When that happens, future historians will look back on the Bush years as paving the way for a golden age of intellectual inquiry." Faster, please.