why did I let you just waste one minute of my time...
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.
Your momma wears army boots!
You must be confused. FR has not been a conservative site for some time now. It is simply a mouthpiece for the GOP. No matter how socialistic the GOP becomes they will always be supported here. Unfortunately.
Nothing like those Anti-tax True Conservatives!
LOL! Great humor break.
TROLL XING
I agree completely. Bush sure as heck isn't perfect, but given our choices he clearly is much preferred. Bush spends a lot of money, Kerry will spend much, much more in less productive ways. To be honest, a Kerry win may actually be better for conservatism, as it may allow the GOP to return to a more conservative vision and make a 2008 win much easier, but it would be terrible for America. For all his faults, Bush is a strong social conservative, has cut taxes and seems eager to continue with tax reform, and above all is the only one of all the candidates who actually sees the threat of Islamofascism and is willing to deal with it. He is the only one who will be able to protect this country, which is more important than medicare spending, gas prices, or anything. Bush will continue to prosecute the war and work towards defeating these wackos. After he is reelected, helping to ensure our safety for another four years, we can focus and reinstilling stronger conservative values in the GOP. Why fret about the smaller issues now???
Like it or not, we have about 15 million in our country illegally. At the rate we are going, there will be 45 million illegally in our country by 2014. That's ten short years from now. By then, our elections will have been completely undermined by fraud and corruption.
Like it or not.
"If you're offended by any of the above, you ought to reconsider if you're a true conservative."
If you're going to post this drivel a week before a Presidential election in a transparent attempt to undermine Bush and support the traitor John Kerry, you ought to reconsider if you're a Communist agent provacateur posing as a "true conservative".
I think ther is overwhelming support from MOST of us for GW because Kerry is THE MOST LIBERAL SENATOR TODAY! Wow, what a supprise we support him here at FR.
you are correct that the other issues are not as important as the war on terror. but i think we can push for progress on multiple fronts, including the social issues which i agree with you also.
I smell Ozone :P
"Deport all people who have immigrated here in the last 10 years, legal or otherwise, criminals or otherwise."
Hurrr ?!... The hell is wrong wit you.
Did you even read what I wrote? I am all for deporting those here illegally. I wish we would do it right now. I deeeply oppose the president's 'amnesty' plan. But how is it conservative, fair, or American to deport those who are here legally, are assimilating, and are contributing to our society? How is it conservative to destroy the lives that legal immigrants have made for themselves in this country?
This punk sounds exactly like the linguini-spined conservatives who abhored Reagan's Peace thru strength initiative. After 40 years of Cold War and Detente, Reagan decided that his predecessors from Truman thru Carter had utterly failed to tame the Soviet Bear. I can still hear the so-called conservatives (along with the pacifist liberals) hand-wringing about Reagan's provacations of the bear. The Soviet Union was a reality, here to stay and we'd just have to live with 1/2 the world in communist bondage. RWR knew better and the Soviet empire collpsed like a house of cards, after alot of confrontational prodding. Now 15 years later, even the liberals try to take credit for being "cold warriors", when in fact it was Reagan and a very small handful of cohorts (including the much maligned Thatcher) that rammed the collapse down the throat of a skeptical world.
Now GWB sees the house of cards on which terrorism is built. It is built upon corrupt regimes that pay off the terrorists to leave them alone. It is built on dictatorships that blame the world's problems on the 'joos' and the Great Satan. It is built upon the Madrassas that teach the kids twisted ideolgy. It is built on the West's long standing tradition of turning a blind eye to the repressive techniques used to prop up the Mullahs and sheiks. Supposed conservatives like this author say "leave well enough alone, it's not our business to be the world's superhero". Well, America has always been the world's superhero, when the chips are down. And those chips came down on 9/11. So the goal is not to remove just one or two dicatorships with terror ties. It is to reshape the entire region of barbarians and bring them into 21st century governance. Only a large man of vision can make this work. Small men, just as in Reagan's day, will carp on the sidelines, as the American juggernaut once again saves mankind.
Oooh! Here's another "I am the Keeper of the Book of True Conservatives, and no one can claim the title unless they think just like me" type of guy.
Yes, the liberals are getting desparate and sending their minimum wage cyber commandos.
Even Bill Buckley isn't as CONSERVATIVE,as you imagine he is and The National Review isn't all that conservative anymore either.
When talking about Conservatives,you aren't even FOOL'S GOLD';you're common dross!Your fortress American,anti-Semitic,antiwar stances are the same ones that the folks over on DU embrace....go over there,since you have much more in common with far lefties,than you do with REAL CONSERVATIVES!
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