Fear and emotion cloud the mind, and make rational decision-making difficult or impossible.
Fear and arrogance blind the eyes and block the ears.
Bush himself is poorly served by supporters who, from fear, refuse to hold him accountable and let him know he is wandering too far afield.He is emboldened by their meek acquiescence and more apt to make poor dicisions himself.
President Bush has surrounded himself with advisors who seek to find new ways to solve old problems, and must alone make difficult decisions every day, decisions that impact all Americans.
On another thread it was pointed out that Bush was having second-thoughts about his bloated "compassionate conservative" social welfare agenda and might scale it back. Why? Because he sensed a backlash. From whom? Certainly not from his die-hard supporters and enablers here at FR.
This "die hard" Bush supporter has enough patience to wait for the release tomorrow of the entire budget. This supporter also knows that the budget was prepared in advance, and no one at the White House has spent the weekend making "second thought" adjustments to pander to extremists on either side.
From whom, then? From faithful critics such as myself who are willing to tell him he is screwing up and losing our support.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back.
His sycophants--his ever-approving greek chorus--are next to worthless in terms of shaping the debate.
No more worthless than his bashers, who know only how to criticize. They certainly don't know how to think up workable alternatives or make effective suggestions.
You know who you are.
Yes, I do. And I trust President Bush more than I trust an anonymous poster on an internet forum, and more than I trust a media that seeks to divide us by hysteria, half-truths, blatant lies, and unsourced leaks.
I might not have this confidence or belief if the Democrats were in control of Congress or even presented a deep threat of retaking Congress. But I am confident the Democrats are settling into the trough of the cycle of power in Congress and will remain there for at least ten years regardless of which party holds the White House. This is our opportunity as conservatives to finally destroy discredited liberal progressivism as an effective force---but we cannot and will not achieve this by simultaneously reviving and recloaking big goverment progressivism as "compassionate conservatism" on our own side!
We are not a nation ruled by kings or dictators for life. The cult of personality is not a sound foundation on which build and maintain a free society. The long term health of this nation is greater than short-term plans and "compassionate conservative" nonsense of George W. Bush and his unthinking supporters.
At the same time, I want to hold out hope that President Bush will come to his senses and turn back from the dangerous direction he has steered us. He still holds the prime and best position to see and guide our way clear to smaller government in the way that Reagan envisioned but was unable to achieve due to Democrat and Rockefeller Republican resistence to it.