Posted on 08/21/2006 3:30:36 AM PDT by Aussie Dasher
No doubt, President Bush has one knee on the canvas. What is in doubt is whether he's buying time or simply cannot get back up.
Just look at the serious body blows he has taken lately:
His bold Bush Doctrine of striking down terror before it shatters us is in disarray in Afghanistan, Iraq, even here at home.
His magnificent ambition to plant the seeds of liberty and spread freedom throughout the enslaved world is unraveling.
His sworn obligation to protect Israel, one of America's few authentic allies, at all costs, and never to accept a peace in Lebanon that resurrects the status quo ante is down the drain.
His stern warnings to Syria and its master Iran to keep their filthy hands off Israel are derided.
His pronouncement that the Free World cannot abide a nuclear North Korea is shrugged off.
His warning, through a United Nations resolution, to Iran that it must by the end of this month abandon its nuclear-weapons program is answered by sneers, insults and invective from Tehran, followed by a salvo of serious Iranian rockets to show it means business even if he doesn't.
His enemies from the left in Congress grow bolder and nastier by the day in what they say of him, threatening impeachment if they regain control of the House of Representatives this November.
Opportunists like a second-term senator from Nebraska within his own party are warming up to walk across his face in quest of the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
Opinion polls, of dubious veracity themselves, are allowed to go unchallenged, thus becoming their own self-fulfilling prophesies that the president is going down the pipes.
The leftist "mainstream" media have abandoned all pretext of accuracy and objectivity, now daily making up bogus anti-Bush stories, trying to outdo one another in venality. While all that's been going on, what counterpunches has the president landed? None that come to mind.
Something quite alarming is going on, and it's showing increasingly in the president's public appearances.
His body language of late has been ... well ... just awful.
Gone are the televised events in which he leans across a podium, full of energy and believability, sharing his convictions and enthusiasm with responsive audiences.
Is This Our President?
Now, his TV-appearance arrangers have him standing awkwardly alone, shifting uncertainly from one foot to the other. In the background sit or stand a few unknowns, all scowling as if in disbelief or suffering acute indigestion.
The president's own visage is scarcely recognizable. Disappeared is the buoyant smile, the twinkling eyes.
His syntax, usually a problem (actually not, since its candid openness was a big plus with most Americans, who speak the same way he does) has been all right. But he now seems unable to articulate anything.
Here is a man who is either grievously sleep-deprived, physically and emotionally drained, or weighted down, in honest despair, by realities that would terrify any mortal.
It Must Be Tempting
Is he on the verge of saying to himself, "To hell with it. I did my best. And all anyone wants from me now is my head on a pike. They can take this job and shove it. I'm heading home to Crawford."?
Or does he know something the rest of us don't know – and probably wouldn't want to know? Does he see apocalypse just over the horizon? Is global nuclear winter nearly upon us, and there's not a blessed thing he can do about it?
Or does he know what has to be done to save this nation, and the rest of civilization? Is it crushing his very soul? Is it like looking straight down the throat of doomsday?
Is he buying time – letting Enemy win all the little battles – so he can furiously regroup, retrain, rearm in order to make the dreadful preemptive move that only can win the ultimate war?
Totally Out of Character
Everything we've come to know about this remarkable, decent man from Texas tells us he has steel inside, not flab, that he is not afraid to do what's right regardless of political consequences. It is impossible to think of him in terms of capitulation to anything.
Yet what is the alternative? Is he about to confide in us, his people, that, like it or not, we are all – including him – going to have to face, and make, a life-or-death decision unprecedented in history?
That's enough to wipe the smile off any man's face.
No one who admires and wishes him well wants to think he is down on one knee, having to take the full count because he has been cruelly beaten, defeated, humiliated, immobilized.
Now Let Us Pray
No one of sane mind wants to believe he is kneeling there, having to take the count up just short of 10 in order to buy every split-second of precious time to get us ready for the indescribable.
Yet, that may well be the lesser of two intolerable possibilities.
This good man, our 43rd president, needs – deserves – the nation's prayers. Even more than did our 16th president.
Abraham Lincoln had to wage a war he hated to save the union he loved. George W. Bush has to agonize about saving civilization.
Those who believe in prayer had better get busy.
We must ALL keep the faith!
Including columnists who describe Bush as having "one knee on the canvas".
Clealry one of the ways the media bring about political loss is by repeatedly describing something as in trouble or losing or unpopular. They make -- or at least try to make -- things unpopular by describing them as such.
It's not just Bush who is in trouble. The Nation is in trouble -- in peril! And articles like this, by personalizing the problem around Bush, strike me as possibly well-meant but not helpful.
At this rate Dubya will never win a third term.
I pray for Bush and the US everyday. We all should.
Two are better off than one, because together they can work more effectively. If one of them falls down, the other can help him up...Two people can resist an attack that would defeat one person alone. A rope made of three cords is hard to break. Ecc 4:9
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Right Karin, I'm so sad about that. </sarcasm>
Sometimes one has to face the truth of it before one can address the problem. We are there as a nation.
This is a problem not just for the US.
Certainly, the US is the leader but every member of the Free World must face these challenges head on.
Neither the elder Bush nor the current President Bush seem to have the courage of conviction held by former President Ronald Reagon. Their undoing, however, is because they are trying to be "nice" to Democrats. They both failed to purge their administrations of operatives who would undo this country. While Clinton ruthlessly purged the elder Bush administration of good hardworking, honest people and replaced them with their own operatives, the current President did not. That action is our undoing. I am keeping the faith, but I am disheartened today.
Consider this."John L. Perry, an award-winning newspaper editor and writer... he was one of the first American journalists allowed into the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin...
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition and it lies at the pit of man's fears and summit of his knowledge.
It is an area which we call
The Twilight Zone.
He served President Lyndon B. Johnson as deputy under secretary of commerce... was a White House speech writer and race-relations trouble-shooter for President Johnson.
In the Jimmy Carter administration... was executive assistant to the under secretary of Housing and Urban Development...was interim director of public information for... (FEMA)"
About the author John L. Perry
Consider this. The writer of the article, John L. Perry is a bleeding heart liberal from long ago.
I don't know what exactly happened to Bush with this Israel/Hezbollah war, but something sure has him spooked.
"Iran so far away..."
Best comment of the thread so far!
Democrats left in government are civil service career employees and cannot be fired without cause. They cannot be fired because they are democrats. That is the law.
Okay, I admit it, I'm stupid. I keep seeing this but I see no disarray, just the usual that happens when you can't fight a war the way a war should be fought (i.e. kill every mother loving one of them in sight, including a boatload of civilians).
What am I missing. How else should the war be prosecuted other than the aforementioned pounding them into the ground?
He will be if the terrorist's best friend, the demoncrats, win in November. God help us all if that happens.
We will know soon, if there is anything behind Iran's lunatic doomsday fantasies.
Maybe the reason he has trouble pronouncing "Nuclear" is because he gags on the thought of what must come.
...nice try, but no cigar! Throughout our history political appointees have resigned at the change of an administration and been replaced with a few exceptions, of course. While the law says that civil service employees cannot be fired without cause, political operatives can and have been reassigned to less harmful positions. An office director of 200 employees can be reassigned to, for example, be in charge of the 55 mph speed limit for the entire United States, with a staff of one! Important and essential sounding job, ehhh?
The operatives also can be encouraged to find other jobs. Counterproductive policies (that lack common sense) where the mission of the organization is less important than EEO, Diversity, etc. can be reversed or corrected. IMO leftist, socialist revolutionaries (democrats) operatives are legion throughout the government, especially the military.
On April 21, 1836, Santa Anna was sure he had Sam Houston on the run. He was so confident, that he and his troops took a little siesta after lunch, resting up from their long trek to the swamps of San Jacinto before their big attack.
The Mexicans awoke to the Texan cries of, "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" as they swooped down for the kill. And kill they did, slaughtering the fleeing Mexican troops by the hundreds and capturing Santa Anna as he tried to sneak out of camp.
Of course, that was in the good old days before the UN would have investigated the Texans for "war crimes" and the US and France would have intervened because the Texans were using "disproportional" force. It's really tough to win the WOT with all the breaks going to the terrorists, thanks to Democrat liberal judges, Democrats in Congress and the ACLU. No wonder the President is looking old and beat up.
A lot of FReepers used to be liberals, many a lot more recently that 1976-80.
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