Posted on 10/13/2005 3:59:54 PM PDT by MikeA
It is no surprise that President Bush has kept his head while practically everyone else in political life – his inveterate detractors, the old media echo chamber, and even some of his supporters – have lost theirs.
Yet, as the perfect political storm has assailed him – the Sheehan sideshow, Katrina’s fury, escalating violence in Iraq leading up to the adoption of its Constitution, presidential advisor Karl Rove’s fourth summons to a grand jury, House Majority Leader Rep. Tom DeLay’s indictment and stepping down from his leadership role, and the hysteria over Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court – the president seems to be the only one to keep his cool, retain his optimism, and plunge forward doing the only thing that matters, the business of the people.
The Sheehan Sideshow
The president refused to meet with Sheehan the second time she demanded an audience, only to see that his judgment was well placed. In short order, Sheehan proved to be a far leftist supported by Communists and radicals, and was promptly marginalized by a media that had embraced her unquestioningly only weeks before. RINO Sen. John McCain, who recently submitted an amendment to the $42 billion Pentagon authorization bill for 2006 to insure that we treat terrorist-prisoners with kid gloves, did meet with Sheehan, only to have her spit in his face by calling him a “warmonger.”
The Katrina Disaster
The president declared New Orleans a disaster area days before Katrina obliterated the city, urging the city’s mayor and Louisiana’s governor to evacuate the city’s citizens with all due speed – which they didn’t! But his one-day-late response after the levees broke brought him widespread condemnation and preposterous accusations of racism by professional race-baiters, Democrat Al Sharpton, Democrat Jesse Jackson, and New York Democrat Rep. Charles Rangel, who compared the president to Democrat “Bull” Connor, the segregationist mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who aimed attack dogs and fire hoses at civil rights marchers.
That is not to omit the caterwauling Democrats from New Orleans, Democrats Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, whose astounding incompetence – as well as ignorance of local and state roles – accounted for the overwhelming problems that ensued.
And what did the president do? He apologized for his tardiness, took full responsibility for any mismanagement, and endowed the stricken area with more money and resources that had ever before been expended for a natural disaster in America.
The Iraq Factor
The president, who is more aware than anyone on earth of what is happening on the ground in Iraq, forewarned the American public early on that the adoption of that country’s Constitution would bring an escalation in violence by the terrorists who are, indeed, terrified of Iraqi freedom.
While liberals were (and are) “stuck on stupid” in chanting their cut-and-run mantra, the president stood side-by-side with battlefield leaders who reinforced our progress and also delivered a powerful speech at the National Endowment for Democracy that reminded Americans of the ubiquitous nature of the threat we face and the non-negotiable necessity of fighting it.
"The images and experience of September the 11th are unique for Americans,” President Bush said, “yet the evil of that morning has reappeared on other days, in other places – in Mombasa, and Casablanca, and Riyadh, and Jakarta, and Istanbul, and Madrid, and Beslan, and Taba, and Netanya, and Baghdad and elsewhere. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane."
The president also reminded the public of the unthinkable price of failure, reassuring them that, “We will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won.” Most people “get” this, even if Democrat “leaders” Joseph Biden, Richard Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer – unfortunately for America, the list of liberal Democrats goes on and on – don’t.
“The Law Is An Ass” (Mark Twain)
The president had to be disappointed at the recent (and, I believe, bogus) indictment of Tom DeLay by the malevolent Detective-Javert-like fanatic, Austin D.A. Democrat Ronnie Earl, whose first two indictments of the congressman were thrown out of court, and when his powerful advisor, Karl Rove, was summoned to a grand jury in the equally bogus Plame case.
How did he react? According, he said, to the letter of the law, which required that he not talk about the cases while they were ongoing. And in keeping with his style, he didn’t miss a beat in doing the business of the people.
The president’s accomplishments include: presiding over a growing economy (that his tax cuts helped to create); a job-growth rate of 5%, which is lower than the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; high consumer confidence, low inflation, a decreasing deficit (with projections to halve the deficit by 2009), and more Americans at work than ever before in history.
In addition, the president has signed, among other legislation, the Central America And Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) which eliminates 80% of tariffs on U.S. exports and is expected to yield billions of dollars in increased sales of U.S. goods and farm exports as well as to keep jobs in the U.S., the first energy plan in more than a decade, a comprehensive Highway bill, the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, a Class Action Reform Lawsuit Abuse bill, and the Bankruptcy Reform bill. And this week, the Senate voted to give the president $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military efforts against terrorism – all this while meeting with world leaders and also health experts to discuss a possible Avian flu pandemic.
The Harriet Hysteria
The president, after due deliberation, nominated Harriet Miers, his White House counsel, to the Supreme Court, only to receive an avalanche of criticism from some intellectual snobs and elitists (including some from his “base”) who condemned the candidate before they had heard her speak one word. The president has stood by his nominee and there is every reason to believe she will soon be a justice who, like the president’s appellate-court appointments – Priscilla Owens, Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, David McKeague and Richard Griffin – will steadfastly honor the Constitution and refuse to legislate from the bench.
The President’s Inveterate Detractors
Where are they now? Democrat Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is still carping and whining. Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy is still venting his spleen. Democrat House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, with her inimitable Betty Boop affect, is still delivering invective. Democrat National Committee chairman Howard Dean is still rewriting history (but not raising any significant money, which is his job!). Democrat Bill Clinton and his longtime Democrat lackey Sandy Berger are still in the news with their scandals and illegalities. Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin, second in status in the Senate, is still spewing slander and smears, as he did when he defamed our heroic military by saying their interrogations of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay were akin to the tactics of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot.
Democrat Al Gore is… where? According to Sher Zieve of americandaily.com, the man she calls Apoplectic Al attended a liberal love-in last week in New York, the “We Media Conference,” where “he quoted from avowed communist Walter Lippman on the subject of `the refeudalization of the public sphere,’” and also stated that, “… every day they (i.e., the scary conservatives) unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President!” This must be what the expression “more to be pitied than scorned” is all about.
And Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton, lusting after the presidency, is trying desperately to appeal to her true “base” of leftists while pretending to appear capable of leading our country in a time of war.
And where is former counter-terrorism “expert” in the Clinton and Bush administrations, Richard Clarke, or former secretary of the treasury Paul O’Neill, or any of the dozens (if not hundreds) of other people who wrote books, fabricated virulently partisan documentaries, and had their 15-minutes of fame on leftist TV shows like “60 Minutes”? I’m sure they’re employed somewhere, but their voices are now mute as a result of what they believed, in 2000, was going to be “a referendum on George W. Bush.”
They were right! President Bush received more votes – nearly 60 million – than any presidential candidate in American history.
In a way, you have to feel sorry for them. Bereft of ideas, total failures at suggesting solutions to any of the problems and challenges that face our nation, liberals have been reduced to a motley crew of glass-is-half-empty bellyachers who, aided and abetted by the leftist old media, inevitably convey to the public that they want America to fail!
Actually, it is they who are failing. Just the other day, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, reported that the group America Coming Together (ACT), funded by America-hating billionaire George Soros with the intention of electing liberal House and Senate candidates and a liberal president in 2004, was closing its offices.
Recalling Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution that “drew support and inspiration from the United States, Feulner concluded that: “Liberals are long on rhetoric but short on solutions…big ideas beat big money.”
Last Man Standing
The one adjective even the fans of liberals could never use to describe them is dignified. Nor could they describe them as patient or forbearing or having grace under pressure. Yet all of these adjectives describe President Bush who in his five years in office has never once devolved to the low level that Democrats occupy – in their speech and behavior –every day.
They’ve tried everything to undermine, compromise and depose him – all to no avail! And so they’ve resorted to waging a campaign not to improve our foreign or domestic policies but rather to prove that a two-time governor of Texas and a two-time President of the United States is less of a politician, policy maker, leader and visionary than they are. What a laugh!
While liberals are now most closely identified with veins bulging in their necks, groping for the next disparaging words to express their burning rage, and whipping themselves into irrational frenzies trying to convince the public that what they see in President Bush is not what they get, they forget that the public is watching a president who forges on through thick and thin, juggling the impossible demands of, among other exigencies, America’s war on Islamic fanaticism and also the most devastating natural disaster in our nation’s history.
Perhaps David Warren, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, captured the president’s essence most accurately when he quoted lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If.”
If you can keep can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise, Then you are a man, my son.
Is there a liberal (or, come to think of it, a Democrat) who even one line of this poem applies to? That is why there is only one survivor in the perfect political storm that has swirled around President Bush for the past couple of months, because his behavior embodies every line of Kipling’s poem. And that is why the Left is going stark raving mad!
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author.
And throughout all this uglieness swirling about him, President Bush just quietly goes about doing important things while unimportant people carp and whine.
So don't despair, all this will pass. And ignore the polls. Almost all of them are over-representing Democrats if you look at the internals. The media is so determined to bring down Bush they'll even rig the polls to try to create a peer-effect in perceptions of Bush. "Well everyone else seems to hate him so I guess I better hate him too!"
History will look back kindly on this man treated very unkindly by a really psychotic political opposition seething with partisan extremism.
That should read:
"The Law is a Ass" (Charles Dickens)
That line was uttered by Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist.
Good article.
Thanks for posting.
Thank you for posting this: Joan writes a to the point article; minces no words. She writes tight columns, IMHO. I agree with her here, President Bush has shown Americans, again, and again, what we want and expect in a President and a Man.
I love how the Miers part is very short and just attacks her critics as "elitists" and "snobs". Puh-leese. Miers was a stupid mistake and should be rectified before she goes before Congress.
Hi Mike. Thanks for the post.
Remember, polls aren't taken to gauge public opinion...they're taken to shape it.
I thought about this on the way to work...for all those who B&C about Miers...it doesn't take 60% of the total electoral votes to elect a president. It doesn't take 60% of the popular vote to elect a Senator who confirms/rejects a presidential nominee.
It DOES take 60% of the Senate vote just to GET a floor vote.
Would we have (do we have) 60 votes to invoke cloture on a Luttig? A McConnell? A Owen? A J.Rogers Brown? Hell's bells, do we even have 50 to go "nucular"? Thanks to the gangrene of 14, it seems that the best we can do is trade spot for spot. I hope not, but I don't think that Chief Justice Roberts would have received 78 votes if he were replacing O'Connor, as was originally planned.
I'm reminded that two outright leftists did not have 20 nay votes combined, when Clintoon appointed them. And does anyone doubt that the Democrats would have gone "nuclear" if we had tried to filibuster (or fake filibuster)? Clinton probably would have recess appointed them...or they would have changed the rules, as they had already done two or three times under Robert KKK Byrd.
Ms. Miers may or may not be qualified to be a SCOTUS justice. I don't know, and even if I did, I am not the President of the United States. I hold to my original opinion: the President nominates, the Senate confirms. And I am neither the President nor a sitting Senator.
He's certainly giving the people "the business" alright.
"Miers was a stupid mistake and should be rectified before she goes before Congress."
I'm not sure on what you are basing your claim that Miers is a mistake. She hasn't done anything yet to merit that claim, nor have we heard a single word in Senate hearings to know that. So therefore how is she a mistake? Because she's not Priscella Owen or Janice Rogers Brown? We were never going to get those judges anyway. The atmosphere in D.C. is too toxic now for Bush to want to further poison things (not that he's the cause of it. The Democratic extremists are.) And who's to say Miers will not be as qualified and conservative?
Ditto ditto ditto.
Beware: the enemy is amongst us.
Could you please use your ping list for this one?
Thanks for posting. Is there a better man among us? Let him step forward.
This is another reminder to me that President Bush is President of all Americans. Not just Republicans because he is of our party. This Harriet Miers fracas has unmasked the true face of those in the conservative movement who have only tolerated him in order to push their agenda. They couldn't get John Bolton nominated so he recess appointed him. They haven't been able to get enough, if any, conservatives elected to the House and Senate thus giving President Bush the range of options needed for selecting a nominee to the Supreme Court. It is obvious to me, that in spite of enemies and back stabbing allies George Bush has the high goal of hearing from the One Who really counts, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant".
1. The Deficit
2. Illegal Immigration
3. LEGAL immigration (what is wrong with European immigrants?)
4.The residual/pervasive/Clintonoid corruption in Government e.g. Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae.
George W., please for heavens sake deal with these too.
Thought you my like this! I certainly do. Am feeling better today. LOL!
He has more on his shoulders than just about any other leader in our country.
My prayers, meager as they are, will continue for him and his administration.
I am sure you are aware of the old saying about opinions and a$$holes.
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