Graham Barrett's Why Bush is still the man to beat (The Age 29/11/03) is another sickening example of the left's mendacity and its hatred of President Bush. According to Barrett it's Bush's fault that the "Middle East is an expensive shambles", Bush is always giving different excuses for invading Iraq, "the rise of terrorism [under Bush] has exposed the most dramatic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbour, the US deficit is the biggest in history, several million American jobs have been lost, environmental pollution is worsening, American diplomacy is in tatters and American global popularity is to be found in a compost bin."
What a so-called damning indictment of Bush and what a rotten bigoted liar Barrett is.
That the Middle East has always been shambles was a fact that Barrett chose to ignore. Recognising it would undermine his criticism of Bush. As for the overthrowing of Hussein's murderous regime, a single excuse for this noble enterprise was never used by the administration. Anyone who followed the debate understands that there were multiple reasons for taking Saddam out. Another fact that Barrett ignored.
Furthermore, it takes a particular type of lowlife lefty to suggest that overthrowing a sadistic despot with the intention of replacing him with a democratic state that will set an example of democrat reform to the rest of region is somehow reprehensible.
Barrett's vicious attempt to blame Bush for the 9/11 intelligence failure can only work if we ignore certain important facts, such as the role the Democrat controlled Congress in the 1970s played in severely crippling America's intelligence agencies. Of course, it's always possible that the Bush-hating Barrett has never heard of the Pike and Church Committees whose recommendations were deliberately designed to damage the country's intelligence capabilities.
Richard Miniter's Losing Bin Laden details Clinton's frightening intelligence failures, his refusal to retaliate over the USS Cole attack, his rejection of Sudan's offer to hand over bin Laden and its intelligence files on his activities. In his book Off With Their Heads Dick Morris accused Clinton of deliberately leaving the al Qaeda problem to Bush. Morris also relates how Clinton intentionally turned away from the terrorist problem even though he knew "everything he needed to."
In the words of Morris: "If history is just, President Bill Clinton will likewise be blamed for leaving George W. Bush a nation unaware of, and unprotected from, the deadly peril that to hit seven months later." Well, history had better be just because the media certainly isn't.
The claim that the "US deficit is the biggest in history" is another anti-Bush lie. Any able economist knows that deficits have to be adjusted for inflation and the size of the economy. When we do this we find that the current deficit not only comes in at 2.8 per cent of GDP but was exceeded in 7 of the last 21 years. (See Ramsey takes a bigoted swipe at President Bush).
Barrett is just as bad on jobs as he is on deficits. He insinuation that Bush caused the loss of "several million American jobs" is another outrageous lie. An honest commentator would have reported that the job losses began under Clinton and not Bush. Anyway, more competent Bush-haters argue that 2.4 million Americans lost their jobs during the first 30 months of the Bush administration. But even this figure is misleading as Barrett, a former external affairs adviser to the World Bank in Washington, should know.
A closer inspection of the stats reveals that the so-called 2.4 million job loss actually measures a decline in government and large corporate payrolls. It seems that Bush critics are unable to distinguish between job rolls and payrolls. I guess that's why they're liberals. If Barrett is right about job losses how come the latest stats from the US Department of Labor show more people working than at any time in American history? Even more damning for the likes of Barrett is the fact that more people are at work today than when Bush took office.
"Environmental pollution is worsening", or so says Barrett. But where is the evidence? Where are the statistics to support the charge? There aren't any because this is just another leftwing lie. It could be that Barrett is alluding to the administration's reform of New Source Review (NSR) regulations under the Clean Air Act. If this is so, then he should have told us about the NSR's obsolete regulations and how, in the words of Robert Stavins of Harvard University, the NSR "retards environmental progress and wastes resources."
"American diplomacy is in tatters and American global popularity is to be found in a compost bin." Really? Let's face facts, any Republican administration diplomacy that the left disapproves of will always be in tatters, incompetent, short-sighted, self-serving, worrisome, dangerous, aggressive, provocative, blah, blah, blah. Exactly the same thing was said of Reagan's foreign policy. Fortunately for the rest of us, Reagan ignored the Barrett's of this world with the result that he buried the Soviet Union and its "evil empire."
It's a bit rich for the likes of Barrett to complain that "American global popularity is to be found in a compost bin" considering that leftwing journalists and anti-American academics throughout the world have dedicated themselves for years to trashing the US. And this includes some of the leftwing creeps that work for The Age, aka The Spencer Street Soviet, a paper that once employed Barrett as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor.
It says a great deal about The Age that it saw fit to publish Barrett's dishonest commentary. Still, it provided us with more evidence of the media's political prejudices, bigotry, mendacity and contempt for the truth.
Bad as The Age is it's sister publication the Sydney Morning Herald is even worse. Both papers are produced by the Bush-hating Fairfax press.
Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' economics editor
