I plan on voting for GWB, but I will definitely be holding my nose. E.g., The GWB defense record is in fact quite mixed.
You listed the highlights. Let's look at the low-lights, which no RAT would, nor could, outline: I would have to tell you that the President has in fact posed a serious obstacle to proper funding of the DOD.
When he came in, it was in absolute crisis, needing another $200 billion immediate infusion to replace broken and worn-out equipment, depleted reserve strength, exhausted armament inventory, R&D and build new aircraft, new ships, and to replace at least two of the 5 Army divisions that Clinton knifed. Cheney had campaigned on replacing those two divisions. Instead, the paltry $15 billion made over Clinton's veto was all that GWB relied on as 'a substantial increase.' Note, the cost of inflation for the DOD exceeded that $15 billion 'increase' by about $8 billion. And GWB was ignoring the extreme degree of dilapidation and depletion left him as a 'poison pill' by Bubba. Refusing to do the supplemental emergency appropriation that was clearly warranted in January...in June he proposed only a paltry $35 billion increase for the whole year...stiffing the obvious need for the $200 billion. No new divisions. No additional new ships. No additional new planes. Was basically only enough to pay for the paltry pay raises of the existing personnel. Hence the extraordinary need by Rumsfeld to do everything on the shoe-string basis, with fewer boots on the ground. Concretely this has negative results: Osama and Saddam got away. It allowed a lot of the Fedayeen to get away and 'melt into the landscape' to fight from ambush another day.
Meanwhile, Clinton-Gore had sold off one of the key US-owned supplies of oil & gas the US military needed....Teapot Dome to a known socialist-supporting front company: Armand Hammer. Now the military needs to BUY oil & gas on the open market. Adversely affecting training and readiness issues.
No reductions of the Clinton-holdovers in the staff.
Continued Clintonization of 'Technology Review' staffing. Ie., decimation of said staff and mission to keep the tech out of communist/enemy hands.
Perpetuation of the 'don't ask, don't tell' insanity, Perpetuation of the US army's 'Blue-Helmut' missions to 60 nations. No roll-back of the over-stretch whatsoever. Caved in, ignominously, and for expressly cavil political calculations, to the Marxist media movement to surrender our operational use of the naval live-fire training base at Vieques, Puerto Rico. The base's value is currently in excess of $15 billion if placed on U.S. mainland, and would not provide an equally effective training environment. And no replacement of the still missing two Army divisions, post 9-11!
The Navy is still declining...ordering fewer ships than we are retiring. No replacement for the retiring F-14 Tomcat, the only long-range naval interceptor capable of protecting the Fleet against the supersonic cruise missiles the RUssians are selling willy-nilly to our enemies.
And the ABM you are so pleased with, appears (at least based on publicly disclosed programs) to be underfunded, and mis-directed. He appears to only be deploying for real the Clinton ground-based defense in Alaska...which can only defend 1-degree of azimuth attacks on the USA. He has consistently scuttled actual go-aheads on deploying the Aegis SM-3 anti-missile system, despite its near-perfect intercept record. He has failed to deploy Brilliant Pebbles. He has failed to re-activate Safeguard (it's better than the nothing currently deployed). He has decommissioned the 100 Peacekeeper MX missiles. He has decommissioned 6 Trident missile submarines. He has decommissioned half of the B-1B bomber fleet, despite their proving to be the most flexible, utilitarian and powerful bomber, bar none in the Iraq war. And then he signed the Moscow Treaty, which was totally unecessary, locking us into forced reductions of our nuclear warhead count down to 1,700. Meanwhile, the provisions on the Russians are expressly non-enforceable.
Then we need to look at the rest of your civil issues with similarly appropriate caution:
Signed into law the No Child Left Behind legislation delivering the most dramatic education reforms in a generation (challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations)
Actually a regurgitation of the facile framing of the issue as made by Karl Rove ( I heard him at the Midwest GOP Leadership conference say the identical nonsense). In fact, it abets and accelerates the Teddy Kennedy program of creating, in effect, a National school board with a whole slew of Kennedy-edicts and mandates that the local schools have to abide by. No actual improvement in the schools. Makes the divestituture of the last remnants of 'local control' almost complete. Schools continue to erode as the 'PC' Marxists continue unchecked as they have long since co-opted the Dept. of Education. No actual reform at the Dept. of Education... or in this bill. Just more federalization. More mandates. Which means less education. Less innovation. Just paper shuffling. Standards continue to be compromised, i.e., watered-down, erased.
Reorganized the INS in an attempt to safeguard the borders and ports of America and to eliminate bureaucratic redundancies and lack of accountability.
More facile double-talk. These are Non-credible assertions. Actually, he Reduced the number of personnel available to patrol. Fought against congressional attempts to budget and increase border patrols. Consistently has ignored evidence that the border weakness has led to many Chinese and Arab infiltration across the borders. Fought against the rights of border patrol organizations to organize and operate to assist in detection and tracking of infiltrators...aiding and abetting the 'civil rights' attacks against these groups. Cut a not-so-secret deal with Vincente Fox to destroy the border, and give Mexico 'carte blanche' to dump their unwanteds on the U.S. And now RINO-Tom Ridge...a close personal buddy of GWB, is openly saying its time to legalize the illegals.
Signed trade promotion authority
As used, this has resulted in a lack of fair trade, undercutting hundreds of thousands of US jobs, while making virtually ZERO headway for US-manufactures sales abroad. Lost 2.7 million U.S. jobs, while simultaneously, U.S. firms increased hiring in China and India by over 3 million. 2+2=4 . This is a brazen and fraudulent wealth transfer program, from the U.S. to the 'Third World'. The US needs the jobs more. Let them get their own.
Committed US funds to purchase medicine for millions of men and women and children now suffering with AIDS in Africa
Actually, he committed $10 billion of OUR money to this 'noble' cause. While there are many lamentable innocents in the tragedy, the fact is that much of it is the result of 'bad actors' i.e., malefactors spreading it through willfulness. And the African governments turn a blind eye to their witch-doctor approach to the problem. And as if our money is the missing ingredient...as if the African countries...Muslim/Marxist racist anti-white apartheid cesspools, were without resources. They have the world's greatest proven reserves of all minerals and precious metals and diamonds, etc. I.e., They need a good kick in the butt, and toppling of their tyrannies. We are propping up those tyrannies instead. Not good. Especially since he was not elected by us to be a spendthrift with OUR money. Selected strong conservative judges
As a local radio personality would say, "We don't know that." One was clearly pro-abortion. We do know though, that he has failed to go to the mat for any of his Court of Appeals nominees that the RATs have brazenly blocked. He could have made recess appointments, or shut down the government spending machines, and held the RATs hostage. But he caved.
And Don't Forget. He also did a 180-degree flip-flop on the Campaign Finance Reform bill of John McCain, despite his previously clear and well-reasoned four main objections to what he later termed 'a good bill.' Now we have the spectacle of the same five 'justices' (Sp?) on the Supreme Court who defend abortion to the hilt (literally), with 300 pages defending the constitutionality of its provisions which clearly were unconstitutional prohibitions on free speech. We will see if the only end run available, the 'Free Press' can be used. Problem: The 'RATS' already own most of it.
Conclusion: A Mixed Bag. And not driven by individual necessary compromises on specific bills with an opposing party. But outright general policy abdication. Sorry, but that's the way it looks.
"he signed the Moscow Treaty, which was totally unecessary, locking us into forced reductions of our nuclear warhead count down to 1,700."
Down to 2,200 nuclear warheads for us, actually, with NO LIMITS on the destructive power of each warhead (which is why we've been upping the destructive power of our keepers).
And what sort of planet is going to exist should we use up 2,200 of 50 MegaTon nuclear warheads in such a short period that we haven't built their replacements (we can freely replace those warheads that we use, per the Moscow Treaty)?
You want *more* Tridents at sea?! You want *more* boots on the ground?!
You need to read Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, for *overspending* on Defense is second only to underspending for killing super-powers, historically.
The F-14 is great, but manned fighters are fast-becoming anachronisms. Where we need pilots, remotely-piloted aircraft will be the wave of the future, and in other areas we will be well-served by unmanned, autonomous drones that can carry more ordinance and make more extreme manuevers due to not having the weight and vulnerabilities of a person on board. So why blow money on systems that we are already obsoleting?
Oh no, President Bush didn't spend more on today's technology than the most hawkish of Pentagon suppliers wanted! What will we ever do?!
Frankly, Bush and Rumsfeld are kicking ass. The old guard of the Pentagon is no doubt hating every moment of having modern adults in charge, no doubt, because that means that they have to change (something that they aren't accustomed to doing).
Our ABM system is going up even as we speak. Our armies are unstoppable. Our aircraft rule the skies. Our navy controls all of the world's oceans, bar none.
We don't need more ships. We don't need more army divisions (we aren't "stuck" in Iraq, we can pull our forces out for whatever other battles we need, and retake Iraq at our leisure, for instance). We don't need to waste money on fighter jets that will be little more than obsolete aerial weapons platforms in 5 years, either.
The key is that we are modernizing, and I fully expect to hear quite a bit of right-wing carping about it along the way.
But our performance is uncontestable, in every sense of the word.