On George Bush and softness

"Don't confuse being 'soft' with seeing the other guy's point of view."
-- George Bush, "All the Best, George Bush Sr"

... Now... George Bush, Jr even more than Sr admittedly, has been for me and many other progressive-minded people in the world one of the biggest and most spectacular and wonderful forgiveness-lessens we have had. The sheer hate that family inspires some (and love in others) is awesome.       :-)

What I think GB is saying here is that often when a "liberal" (in the US meaning, meaning left wing) person is seeing somebody else's point of view (like somebody not liking being invaded by the US I guess), then he is not really being understanding or advanced, he is being soft, which means he's useless and ineffective. (He might be saying the opposite, in context.) I would guess he thinks that to be effective in life one has to be hard and take responsibility, and if one has to kill 100 lives to save a thousand, one just has to do it.
The Dirty Harry school of politics as it were.

Funny enough I agree with it.
But where it fails is in instances where, for example, the revenge wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) for the 9/11 incident (fall of the World Trade Center) cost 50 times as many lives on both sides as they avenged, and even then they did not solve the problem of terrorism.

To me personally anyway, it seems that as I progress and get rid of hard emotions and take more personal responsibility, I do get softer, and I get more and more of a tendency to see the other persons viewpoint.