Posted on 10/25/2004 4:29:44 PM PDT by Tuttle
Kerry’s the One
By Scott McConnell
There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge—the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry—seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.
But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.
It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s perfect foil—its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.
During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East.
Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do. It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security.
These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists—indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.
I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?
The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency—and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.
But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency—and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.
If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.
ZOT!
I have given my point of view many times. Every post, you refuse to deal with the heart of the discussion, which is what is so wrong with limited, legal immigration and what is so wrong with allowing people who came here legally and have made their lives here to stay. Instead of addressing that, you go off and talk about a host of problems caused by mass illegal immigration and unlimited legal immigration, which I am against. The problems that you have highlighted are not a product of limited, legal immigration, they are a product of poor allocation of resources, inefficient government, and ILLEGAL immigration. Unless you answer the underlying question, I'm done because this arguement is going nowhere.
You can put your whip away. That account has been banned.
Read back. I addressed it several times.
People that are already here legally are not going to be deported. Trust me. It's not an issue.
Specifically, see #65.
Works for ME!!
SAM
It's not the machine. There's a
mismatch on the personnel code
numbers... Ah there we go! That's a
B58/732 when it should be a T47/215
... Tuttle ... he should have £31.06,
debited against his account for
electrical procedures, not Buttle.
KURTZMAN
Oh my God, a mistake!
SAM
It's not our mistake!
KURTZMAN
(eagerly)
Isn't it? Whose is it?
SAM
Information Retrieval.
KURTZMAN
Oh, good!
SAM
Expediting has put in for electrical
procedures in respect of Buttle,
Archibald, shoe repair operative, but
Security has invoiced Admin for
Tuttle, Archibald, heating engineer
He's dead, Jim.
(Click here or on the pic).
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Viking Kitty/ZOT ping list!. . .don't be shy.
Jim says essentially the same thing I have said. It's not what we would like but we have to accept the lesser of 2 evils. Until we can break the back of liberalism we cannot move toward real Conservatism.
NO ONE should be Granted Citizenship who Cannot Speak our Language, (& Therefore, Cannot Read our Declaration, Constitution, or Laws) &, Therefore, Cannot function in our Society!
Our Laws are WRITTEN IN ENGLISH;--NO Citizen of our Nation can POSSIBLY PARTICIPATE in our Political Process UNLESS He/She is FLUENT in our Language!!
Unless an Individual can PROVE they are FLUENT in "English," He/She has NO Business Participating in our "Electoral Process!!"
Our American Laws are Written in English.
Unless an Individual is Familiar with Both the Language, & the Assumptions & Precedents associated with Anglo/American Common Law, They've got NO Business Voting in an "English-Speaking" Election!!
American/English Common Law has NO Commonality with "Hispanic Jurisprudence!!"
It's Time we Required our "Hispanic SubCulture" to either "Assimilate," or Migrate to a More Compatible Society.
A Culture's Identity is Largely Dictated by the Assumptions Inherent in the Language the Culture Uses; to Attempt to Change a Culture's Primary Language is to Attempt to Change the Very Basis of the Culture.
Americans Speak "American English;" our Laws & Rules & Customs are expressed in our Native Language. The VAST MAJORITY of our Nation is NOT WILLING to change those "Laws & Assumptions" to "Hispanic Law!!" NO WAY Americans will accept "Hispanic Law"--In Any Form!!
"In Short," If You Speak Spanish, you MUST LEARN ENGLISH to obey American Law!!
Despite a MASSIVE Cultural Effort, Americans will speak American English--& American Law will be AS IT IS; Based on English Law!!
IN SUM; America will Remain a Vast "Melting Pot," But the LAWS will Remain Those of America--Based on English Law, & WRITTEN & INTERPRETED IN AMERICAN ENGLISH!!
There will be NO "Culture-Specific-Modifications" of American Constitutional Law---EVER!!
So, Just because you feel you represent a "Repressed Minority," Don't believe you can Circumvent the American Constitution--EVER!!
The Guys who Wrote our Constitution were FAR WISER than Most of the Rulers of our "Modern-Day Bananna Republics," & MOST of our Citizens STILL Understand That Fact!!
America Still Exists because Most of our citizens Still Understand that Other Forms of Government are Disastrous!!
We can ONLY HOPE THAT we can Continue to teach our Children the Consequences of Bad Choices!!
Doc
Not a ringing endorsement to throw away a vote on John Kerry.
So I take it you disagree? I want to shut down the open borders and deport all illegal aliens. What do you want?
Reminds me of some of my fellow Christians (of course, they wouldn't consider me a fellow Christian probably since I'm such a heretic and all.)
Most of the so-called "legal immigrants" came here illegally. Take the liberal Governor of Kalifornia for instance. You know....the Austrian who just banned Americans from owning .50 cal rifles in that state. I say deport him.
HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Hey! Turtle! Too bad ya can't be here to reply!!!
Picture me, hands on hips, sticking tongue out, saying "Neener, neener, neeeeeener"!
And President Bush is as CONSERVATIVE,if not more so,as Reagan! Sooooo...was President Ronald Wilson Reagan just not Conservative enough for you? :-)
President Bush the younger is NOT "the lesser of two evils" and since you appear to "think" that he is evil,just WHO would you say is more Conservative than he is? Dollars to donuts,whoever that person is,he would haves about as much chance of winning any elected office as my left slipper has.
"REAL CONSERVATISM"? Is that anything at all resembling reality,or just your own wee delusions?
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