Paul Krugman had a piece a while ago saying that a colleague had asked him to write something positive about George Bush, in the interests of fairness, but he couldn’t think of anything. The colleague suggested Bush’s support for free trade, but shortly after that Bush slapped tariffs on imported steel, so Krugman wrote about that.

Always eager to emulate Paul Krugman, I thought about the challenge. It struck me that there was something positive about Bush – he seemed to be genuinely non-racist, and had not gone after racist votes. The contrast with Australian and European rightwing politicians (and many alleged leftwingers) was, I thought, striking.

All this was in my piece in Thursday’s Financial Review. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read it on the AFR site, but it will be on my site soon.