Mention the name George W. Bush in mixed company, and you're likely to spark a lot of debate and emotion—hot and cold, good and bad. Not a lot of neutral reaction. He was elected in the most controversial contest in American electoral history and governed during one of the most tumultuous decades. And so, not surprisingly, people have strong opinions about him.

But as time has passed, and we take a step back and view those times and events in the rear-view mirror, a more balanced picture is emerging, reflected in a poll released this week by The Washington Post. That is why history's evaluation of political leaders like Winston Churchill and Harry Truman are so much different that the judgment they received during their tenure.

George W. Bush is not preoccupied with his legacy—nor with his popularity. He never has been. He has always led based on core conviction and strong principles and has believed that time and distance would allow for context.

The stereotypical congressperson is venal, petty, self-interested, and oblivious to the consequences of his or her actions. In other words, a terrible person.

In reality, this isn’t fair. Are most lawmakers compromised in one way or another? Yes. Are most angling for whatever political advantage they can take? Absolutely. But by and large, the people we send to Congress are doing the best they can to do good work and represent their constituents.

Montana Sen. Max Baucus, however, isn’t one of them.

Bill O’Reilly, by his own admission, was so “angry” that it was driving him “crazy.”

In the wake of the Boston bombing, he was upset at Tom Brokaw for saying the country should examine its use of drones that are killing civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and turning young people against America.

“Let me get this straight, Tom,” the Fox News host thundered. “We shouldn’t use drones to attack al Qaeda leadership or Taliban terrorists hiding in the mountains of Pakistan? We shouldn’t do that? So how exactly would you fight the war against terrorism, Tom? Do you want to invade Pakistan?”

Call it Game Change: Hollywood.

Five years after Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s epic primary battle captivated the nation and tore apart longtime Democratic allies, the two sides are squaring off again. The prize this time is not the Democratic nomination for president but the mayoralty of Los Angeles.

Over the weekend, former president Bill Clinton stumped in the city for city comptroller Wendy Greuel, a staffer in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during his administration. The duo hosted a town hall meeting and made a requisite stop at Langer’s Deli downtown. While they were out on the hustings, David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 effort and a top adviser during his first term, tweeted: “Not an Angeleno but will never forget Eric Garcetti bundled up during frigid last days of Iowa, canvassing relentlessly for then Sen Obama.”

If you live in Arkansas, you can now carry a concealed gun into a bar, or a liquor store—or a church.

College staffers can bring guns on campus. Folks with a permit from other states can pack heat in Arkansas without filing any paperwork.

These are among the half-dozen legal changes in the state that passed only four months since the Newtown massacre, and Arkansas has plenty of company. While the Senate failed to pull the trigger on expanded background checks last week, 15 states have already passed 25 gun rights measures this year.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) handily won reelection in November, even though his House colleagues had voted to censure him for ethics violations in 2010 by an overwhelming margin, 333 to 79. He could have left those charges alone, knowing they had not dissuaded his constituents from supporting him, but that wouldn’t be the Rangel way. So he is back fighting with a lawsuit filed against House Speaker John Boehner and the six lawmakers who sat on the ethics panel that brought the charges against him.

The substance of the charges against him are almost a sideshow: failing to pay taxes on the rental income he received from a vacation home in the Dominican Republic and using his position as a powerful committee chairman to solicit donations from companies wanting to court him top the list. Rangel has taken issue with how the six-member Ethics Committee arrived at their decision and whether relevant information was withheld.

That’s where it gets interesting. Jay Goldberg, Rangel’s attorney, uncovered a secret July 2011 memo from Democratic staff director Blake Chisam outlining at length his concerns about the performance of two committee attorneys, Stacy Sovereign and Cindy Morgan Kim. The most stinging of the complaints are politically charged, accusing the attorneys of essentially being in cahoots with the Republican members, constructing scenarios that went beyond the facts to charge Rangel, and alleging that Sovereign in particular made racially prejudicial remarks suggesting a bias that made coworkers uncomfortable.

So far, it doesn’t look like the story of the Tsarnaev brothers is killing Republican support for immigration reform. John McCain and Lindsey Graham insisted that their identity makes reform all the more important. But Boston aside, if you pay a little attention you see signs that the right is getting a bit restive about all this reasonableness. There’s a long and winding road from here to there, but if the GOP does drop immigration, then it will essentially be a party of nothing, the Seinfeld Party, a party that has stopped even pretending that policy is something that political parties exist to make.

Yesterday in Salon, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote up the following little discovery, which has to do with the numbering of bills. Historically, the party that controls the House of Representatives reserves for itself the first 10 slots—HR 1, HR 2, and so on. Usually, the majority party has filled at least most of those slots with the pieces of legislation that it wants to announce to the world as its top priorities. When the Democrats ran the House, for example, HR 1 was always John Dingell’s health-care bill, in homage to his father, a congressman who pushed for national health care back in the day.

Today, nine of the 10 slots are empty. Nine of the 10. The one that is occupied, HR 3, is taken up by a bill calling on President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Even this, insiders will tell you in an honest moment, is completely symbolic and empty: the general expectation among Democrats and Republicans is that Obama will approve the pipeline sometime in this term, but that eleventy-jillion lawsuits will immediately be filed, and the thing won’t be built for years if at all, and nothing about this short and general bill can or is designed to change that. One other slot, HR 1, is provisionally reserved for a tax-reform bill, so at least they have settled on a subject matter, but if you click on HR 1, you will learn that “the text of HR 1 has not yet been received.”

On the eve of the dedication of his presidential library, can George W. Bush be rehabilitated?

Such things have been known to happen.

Modern scholars, for instance, consistently rate Harry S. Truman in the first rank of American presidents. But when Truman left the White House in January 1953, he was one of the least respected chief executives in history—his nearly eight years in office beset by petty scandals, a lingering war in Korea and the indelible image of a ward-heeling haberdasher unworthy of the godlike legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It’s been called the most exclusive club in the world, with membership limited to living ex-presidents and the current occupant of the Oval Office.

On Thursday, Barack Obama is joining four of his predecessors—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and the two Bushes—for a reunion of that club, to mark the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. It is a rare moment for the country to savor, with all five coming together in the warm glow of friendship to underscore the special bond that exists among those who have held the presidency. They rarely speak ill of each other, at least not in public, and stand ready to respond like a troupe of superheroes in times of crisis.

“There’s no job like it, and there are very few in our history who have held it,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Monday. Obama’s presence at the ceremony Thursday is evidence of that special bond, which the president believes trumps policy and political differences, Carney said. “He is firmly of the view that every one of his predecessors that he will be seeing in Dallas approached their job trying to do the very best for the country, that they all love their country, and they made policy decisions based on what they thought was the right thing to do.”

Lost in the horrendous events of last week was an opportunity to talk about what we normally talk about on April 15: taxes. President Barack Obama, one of the wealthiest presidents of the past century, with a net worth of about $14 million and income last year of more than $600,000, paid an effective federal tax rate of 18.4 percent.

Yes, this is the same Obama who’s delivered this message for the past two years:

For a debate often mired in tedious details conducted in obscure hearings, the president put a victim’s face—Warren Buffet’s struggling secretary; never mind that some estimated she makes $200,000 a year herself—on the matter. Call it the Obama rule: If you are wealthy, says the president, taking a tax break you don’t need isn't right.

“He looks like me,” my son, Shibli, 10, said as we looked at a photo of a young Dzhokhar Tsarnaev flash upon the TV screen Friday night. Indeed, with his innocent eyes and rumple of dark curly hair, he did. As an American, a Muslim, a mother, and an aunt to a nephew on the cusp of manhood, my heart just broke for yet another boy lost in our Muslim community, taking with him the lives of others.

Enough, enough, enough, I say, with the CYA—Cover Your A**—strategy in our Muslim communities. I would like our community to take responsibility for how it is that we—yes, we—have allowed an interpretation of Islam to prevail in this world that turns this boy of innocence into a bomber and murderer. We need to work with compassion and love to guide these boys to a “straight path,” as mentioned in the Quran’s first chapter, Al-Fatiha, “the Opening.” And that straight path should be one of nonviolence.

There is much debate about the “T-word,” or “terrorism,” and whether President Obama took too long to say it in the case of the Boston bombing. In the same way, we—Muslims, journalists, and policymakers—have to dare to say the “I-word”—Islam—because there is no denying that an interpretation of Islam is sanctioning some Muslims to commit terrorism. I believe that until Muslims directly challenge it, we will never really isolate this interpretation of Islam, and the world will judge all Muslims.

Once again an emotional debate is swirling around the Obama administration’s treatment of a terrorist suspect. Its decision not to read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights by invoking the so-called public-safety exception has anguished civil libertarians, who see it as a slippery slope toward police-state justice. Meanwhile, the administration’s decision not to brand the suspected Boston Marathon bomber as an enemy combatant has provoked howls from Republican members of Congress who say terrorists are war criminals who don’t deserve the gold-plated justice afforded by the U.S. criminal-justice system. Moreover, they argue, the government’s overriding priority ought to be extracting intelligence from terror suspects rather than protecting its ability to prosecute a case in civilian court. (Never mind that Obama would be in defiance of the law if he tried Tsarnaev, a naturalized U.S. citizen, in a military commission.)

There’s nothing unusual about the administration being buffeted from all directions by the politics of terrorism. What is different this time is that Obama officials seem to have approached the Boston case with a serene confidence that was lacking during most of the first term. Sources tell me there have been none of the usual fevered White House meetings or the deep divisions between administration lawyers and White House political factions that have characterized many of the other debates over terrorism policy.

For much of President Obama’s first term, the administration tangled itself up trying to calibrate security and civil liberties. The congressional backlash over efforts to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court left the White House’s rule-of-law agenda in tatters.

At times last week, it felt like the days after 9/11: the endless TV coverage, the heroic first responders, the ghastly images, the interfaith prayer services. But something was missing. It took me a few days to realize it: this time, America isn’t going to remake the Muslim world.

After 9/11, that missionary impulse took different forms. For Ann Coulter, who proposed that “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” the post-9/11 “crusade” was literally that. Others were more ecumenical. In his address to Congress a week after the attacks, George W. Bush declared “freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us.” And many who loathed Bush—myself included—cheered, believing that the best way to prevent another 9/11 was to wage a generational struggle for democracy in the Muslim world, as we had in Europe when its species of totalitarianism threatened our safety.

No one’s saying that anymore. To the contrary, all the Boston-related policy debates have been internal: should the police have read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, should he be tried before a military tribunal, does the attack weaken the case for immigration reform, or would a background check have helped? In part, this inward gaze stems from the particularities of attack. The suspects have not been linked to al Qaeda central, and al Qaeda central—which on 9/11 was basically running Afghanistan—is not what it once was. Unlike their 9/11 predecessors, these suspected killers are Americans—they were immigrants before they became terrorists. And unlike 9/11, where most of the suspects came from Saudi Arabia, a seething corner of America’s empire, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucuses, a seething corner of Russia’s.

If you harbor any doubt about the power of words, just take a look at Greg Walden. Last week the eight-term Republican congressman from Oregon went on CNN and accused Barack Obama of “trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors”—a reference to the president’s proposed cuts to Social Security. Walden—who recently became chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, meaning he will oversee the GOP’s effort to hold on to the House in 2014—was effectively attacking Obama from the left. And soon enough, conservatives were attacking him.

The Club for Growth, which punishes any Republicans who stray from its small-government orthodoxy, threatened a primary challenge. “We always knew Greg Walden had a liberal record, but he really cemented it with his public opposition to even modest entitlement reform,” said the group’s president, Chris Chocola. Asked about the rogue congressman at a press conference, House Speaker John Boehner replied, “I’ve made it clear that I disagree with what Chairman Walden said”—and added for good measure, “We’ll leave it at that.”

The sudden infamy was a big change for Walden, who prior to last week was not a household name in Washington. The congressman hails from the sprawling flatlands east of Portland, where he routinely garners wins by margins of 30 points or more—something Oregonians attribute to his relentless travel around the eastern part of the state. “People in that part of the world, they want you to take your time to talk with them, and Greg will travel to these small towns and stay until he has heard from everyone,” says Greg Leo, executive director of the Oregon GOP, adding that Walden is one of the most gifted public speakers in state politics. Leo says he doubts local conservatives were much concerned with Walden’s supposed apostasy. “Greg read it in a uniquely accurate way. That is an Oregon quality—we call ’em as we see ’em, no matter what the party line.”