Posted on 11/26/2003 5:49:00 AM PST by PeteFromMontana
Say what you will, Bush is president until 2008
By JAMES McWILLIAMS
Call the man dim, call him corrupt, but call him president until 2008. George W. Bush certainly has vulnerabilities, but he's been smart enough to model himself on a man who pioneered the fine art of political image-making: Andrew Jackson. Democrats, as a result, are doomed.
In 1819, as the dust settled from his bloodthirsty and blatantly unconstitutional attack on the Seminole Indians, Jackson, then one of the nation's most revered generals, found himself on the congressional hot seat. Didn't he know, John Quincy Adams lectured with great pomposity, that his usurpation of military authority would have been better explained on the high ground of national and international law -- laws codified for the ages by the like of Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattell?
Jackson, a man of dubious literacy, paused for a moment and then remarked for the ages, "Damn Grotius! Damn Pufendorf! Damn Vattell!"
It was a strategic retort, designed to show that he was not the kind of man who would let the law get in the way of a war. He was a man who acted first and thought later. Here was a man for America.
Sure enough, Adams notwithstanding, the United States couldn't have identified more with Jackson's instinctual, as opposed to reasoned, justification for slaughtering the Seminoles -- and it helped ensure his election.
We haven't matured much. There's something eerily Jacksonian about our current commander in chief, a man who also favors instinct over principle.
Bush embroiled the country in a war based on a series of false assumptions. His genius has been to recognize that, politically, it doesn't matter. Saddam Hussein has been ousted and if anyone is still nagging us about those pesky weapons of mass destruction, it's just sour grapes.
Of course, thoughtful (if elaborate) justifications against the war have been articulated. But we don't necessarily want our leaders to be thoughtful. Bush has had the finest education a man can buy or inherit, but the only time he mentions it is when he brags that he was a C student at Yale. He's more likely to be photographed holding an ax than a book.
He plays up his Texas heritage (we're all kinda slow in Texas) at the expense of his Connecticut connections (people there, of course, are smarter). Hacking away at mesquite grub on his Crawford ranchette, he convincingly puts forth the image of a rugged individualist, a doer, a true frontiersman, a man who's never quoted a law in his life but has made laws to suit his base urges, a plowman rather than a professor.
Who knows why we lap it up, but lap it up we do. Those of us so bold as to call ourselves intellectuals read the journals, write the books, construct the carefully detailed and, yes, objective arguments against the war in Iraq. We know, deep in our principled hearts, that we are right in a rational and moral sense. But so what?
The nation has no patience for long-winded justifications. In fact, it is suspicious of them. Until someone figures out that the house of cards the administration has built must be crumbled by a yeoman with a sledgehammer and not a smarty-pants with a book, King George's manifest destiny will be to reign as the favored son of King Andrew.
McWilliams is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University, San Marcos.
What a pretentious jackass. If he were really an "intellectual," then he would know that everybody "knows" that they are right.
Praise the Lord President Bush is willing to serve his country in spite of idiots like this professor-lite.
It may be true that GWB's image makers are trying to associate him with Ronald Reagan, which GWB is not, but GWB is a very tough and rugged fellow in his own right. He may be the offspring of Connecticut royalty, but he is a Texan, a cowboy and a USAF fighter pilot. Those trashy liberal university revolutionaries pale in comparison to GWB.
I'm already looking forward to seeing how the dems have been changed by this trauma by the year 2007 ;-)
No shortage of false modesty here! Texas State produces more teachers than any other school in Texas. Now you know where they get it from.
Dang. That's what we get for trusting Bill Clinton. You'd think we'd have learned. He's the guy who told us they were there back in '98.
Oh, well.
Where the heck is Texas State?
And an idiot.
Not to trash all of academia, but there is a yawning chasm between the esteem these people hold themselves in compared to their actual WORTH to the republic.
All the assistant professors of history could go on strike tommorow yet the nation wouldn't miss a beat.
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