GEORGE W BUSH has been the butt of jokes for years. However, here Julie Burchill mounts a defence for the outgoing US President and we show how he turned the tables on his critics.

IN our recent book Not In My Name: A Compendium Of Modern Hypocrisy, my co-author Chas Newkey-Burden quotes none other than Bob Geldof as saying, “You’ll think I’m off my trolley, but the Bush administration is the most radical – in a positive sense – in its approach to Africa, since Kennedy”.

Chas goes on to say: “Sir Bob contrasted this to Europe’s ‘pathetic and appalling’ response and Clinton’s record, ‘He did **** all’.”

Many aid charities have echoed his praise for Bush. Bono, too, has had many good things to say about him.

None of this is good enough for your modern hypocrite, though. For them, Bush will always be the devil incarnate.

Funny, isn’t it, how people who contribute no more to the cause than buying a wristband should feel so comfortable hurling abuse at a man who has done more than most to help Africa.

The fact is, that for the past eight years, George W Bush (who hands over the most powerful position in the world to Barack Obama on Tuesday) has been the whipping boy — “a scapegoat; one who is singled out for blame or punishment” — of the West.

Curiously, and somewhat hypocritically, he has been abused for both imaginary sins and real virtues.

An alleged half-wit (the kind who majors in history at Yale and graduates from Harvard) who reads two serious books a week.

A supposed Christian killjoy who has conquered a hefty drink habit. A crazed warmonger who, quite rightly, did not fight in America’s vile war against Vietnam.

Mocked for being a loyal husband to a smart, attractive wife while his priapic predecessor treated women like dirt.

(How strange that the black feminist writer Toni Morrison, defending Clinton after he was revealed as a rampant, misogynist he-slut, called him “our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” What an insult to black men!)

A sexist, racist Neanderthal who has promoted blacks and women to heights no Democratic administration has ever dreamed of. (The mind boggles when one imagines what Bill Clinton would have tried to do to beautiful, brilliant Condoleezza Rice, but making her Secretary of State wasn’t one of them. Making her his secretary, ready at hand to sexually harass, more like.)

Embracing change ... kiss for Condoleezza Rice

Indeed, if W had not promoted the excellent likes of Rice and Colin Powell to their unparalleled positions of black power in the US, I find it very hard to believe Obama would be about to become America’s first true black President.

(And no, Toni, it’s not about being a self- righteous, sexually incontinent swindler, as you strangely and somewhat self-loathingly seemed to believe back then.)

It was the “racist” Bush who got white America used to seeing black Americans in high office — I don’t recall good ol’ boy Bill having much use for them except to wheel out that old fraud the Reverend Jesse Jackson (himself famous for cheating on his wife with a cast of thousands, including the singers Nancy Wilson and Roberta Flack) for that cringeworthy White House pray-in after Bill was caught sticking his cigarillo where he shouldn’t.

After being roped into a further prayathon with Chelsea and Hillary Clinton, the Rev Jesse described the First Lady as pained and humiliated but not shocked by her husband’s antics.

With friends like that, who needs enemas?

(And while we’re at it, can the British chattering classes stop bleating on about the singular racist ignorance of Americans compared to we oh-so-civilised Europeans? They’re about to get a black President; the best we could do was put a black man on the shortlist for the awesome task of playing the 11th Doctor Who. And even then he got passed over for the wonder of Whitey! And while we’re on Doctor Who and politics, it’s sad that while 6.1million Britons watched BBC TV to see the new Doctor being announced, only 1.3million saw the next President of the USA being announced. And we dare laugh at the Yanks for being politically ignorant and obsessed with celebrity!)

Family man ... holding new-born twin daughters Barbara and Jenna in 1981

So... it was the “homophobic” dastard Dubya who, mysteriously, signed the Worker, Retiree and Employer Act which allows the rollover of pensions from a dead gay person to a partner without taxconsequences — as has always been the case for straights.

Nothing he does is so petty that Bush-haters won’t nitpick at it.

I remember being stunned by the Fahrenheit 9/11 film, in which Bush was roundly mocked for... taking a holiday!

(Funny how puritanical people get when it comes to a man they like to accuse of being an uptight Born-Again.)

And remember the mixed infants playground-quality jeering — BUSH NEEDS TO GO POTTY — when in 2005, during a UN world summit, Bush made the unforgivable error of passing a note to his Secretary of State saying: “I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible?".

Firstly, can I say how refreshing and charming I found it to see a privileged white man — the most powerful man in the world! — ask the advice of his black female subordinate, assuming, without any threat to his status or masculinity, that she knew more about such things than he.

And secondly, let’s not forget that there were more than 150 “world leaders” there — prime ministers, presidents and monarchs — some of them probably not democratically elected.

Let’s be honest, some of them probably filthy rich, corrupt, unelected feudal Islamist potentates.

And Arab pride is apparently so pathetically fragile that its honour can be “insulted” at the tiniest perceived slight.

Who knows what a firestorm a President peeing without permission might have caused among these delicate desert flowers?

Why, they might have done something really butch and Carrie Bradshaw-ish like throwing their shoes at him!

The great Natan Sharansky — who learned a thing or two about humanity during years banged up in Soviet labour camps — once said to Bush: “Mr President, I see you as a dissident. Dissidents believe in an idea. They suffer a lot. But history proves them right.

It remains to be seen how history will deal with Dubya, but chances are its verdict will be much fairer — and thus far more favourable — from the ocean-going snobs, suck-ups to Islamic terror and all-round hypocrites who have been so eager to transfer all their own weaknesses and demons on to the shoulders of this really rather decent man.

Modest, too. At his final White House press conference the President joked to journalists that they had “misunderestimated him”.

He critiqued himself robustly for rash rhetoric and defended himself handsomely from those armchair rescue workers who pilloried him over Hurricane Katrina: “Don’t tell me the response was slow when there were 30,000 people pulled off the roofs right after the storm passed.”

He praised Barack Obama — and warned him that Islamofascism is the greatest threat to peace and progress.

I leave the last words to my co-author: “Bush was a true maverick. The most powerful man in the world, he quite rightly didn’t care what the superficially superior yet basically self-loathing European dinner party set thought of him.

“It’s a dangerous world and he understands the dangers better than most. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a few years, Bush is being widely missed.”