This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 9th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As the Bush presidency approaches its final year,

what will dominate the Bush legacy.

Glenn Greenwald in his new book a tragic legacy how a good versus evil mentality destroyed

the Bush presidency argues that by casting so many issues as absolute moral struggles,

Bush has significantly damaged honest public debate.

Greenwald argues that Bush's intractable positions on the war in Iraq and engagement with Iran

have not been based on pragmatism but on a moral crusade.

I spoke with him prior to his book forum this week.

Before September 11th, the number one topic on Bush's plate,

as I recall, was stem cells.

And I thought that he gave every indication of trying

to navigate both sides of that debate in sort of a mealy mouth sort of way.

My memory may be flawed, but it seems like he was trying to craft a compromise, which seems

to differ somewhat with what you argue in your book, but given how he's treated that issue more recently with his first presidential veto,

it would seem that even on that issue he has become polarized, was 9-11 the big the big turning point there for polarizing Bush

Absolutely I think it was and and actually one of the points that I make in the book and the thing that interested me most about his presidency was if you look at even the

post 9-11 behavior in the immediate aftermath the weeks and even months after

September 11th you read his speeches and it really is a different George Bush

so this is a president president who was elected with with many fewer votes

than his opponent and and had very low approval ratings before September 11th and

...