Bush, in parting, identifies with Lincoln

From 43's final White House news conference:

Q    Well, a couple years ago, Charles Krauthammer, columnist and Harvard-trained psychiatrist, coined a term, "Bush derangement syndrome," to talk about your critics who disagreed with you most passionately -- not just your policies, but seemed to take an animosity towards you.  I'm just wondering, as you look back, why you think you engendered such passionate criticism, animosity, and do you have any message specifically to those -- to that particular part of the spectrum of your critics?

THE PRESIDENT:  You know, most people I see, you know, when I'm moving around the country, for example, they're not angry.  And they're not hostile people.  And they -- we never meet people who disagree, that's just not true.  I've met a lot of people who don't agree with the decisions I make.  But they have been civil in their discourse.

And so, I view those who get angry and yell and say bad things and, you know, all that kind of stuff, it's just a very few people in the country.  I don't know why they get angry.  I don't know why they get hostile. It's not the first time, however, in history that people have expressed themselves in sometimes undignified ways.  I've been reading, you know, a lot about Abraham Lincoln during my presidency, and there was  some pretty harsh discord when it came to the 16th President, just like there's been harsh discord for the 43rd President.

You know, Presidents can try to avoid hard decisions and therefore avoid controversy.  That's just not my nature.  I'm the kind of person that, you know, is willing to take on hard tasks, and in times of war people get emotional; I understand that.  Never really, you know, spent that much time, frankly, worrying about the loud voices.  I of course hear them, but they didn't affect my policy, nor did they affect -- affect how I made decisions. ...