Posted on 05/22/2006 6:16:18 PM PDT by M. Thatcher
A much-esteemed, long-neglected friend sent an email this morning, which was delightful to recieve. At one point he mentioned this post from yesterday and wrote: I think (President Bush) has lost his bearings. but then, so did Moses from time to time, it’s quite understandable.
That made me wonder a little - has President Bush lost his bearings, or have we? Is it President Bush who has broken faith with “his base” or have they?
When I read my friend’s line, I thought of a line from Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennett says in new appreciation of Mr. Darcy, “In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was.”
Perhaps I am a dim bulb, but President Bush has never surprised me, and that is probably why I have never felt let down or “betrayed” by him. He is, in essentials, precisely whom he has ever been. He did not surprise me when he managed, in August of 2001, to find a morally workable solution in the matter of Embryonic Stem Cells. He did not surprise me when, a month later, he stood on a pile of rubble and lifted a broken city from its knees. When my NYFD friends told me of the enormous consolation and strength he brought to his meetings with grieving families, I was not surprised. When the World Series opened in New York City and the President was invited to throw the first pitch, there was no surprise in his throwing (while wearing body armor) a perfect strike.
He did not surprise me when he spoke eloquently from the National Cathedral, or again before the Joint Houses of Congress, when he laid out the Bush Doctrine. He did not surprise me when he did it again at West Point, or when he went visionary at Whitehall (don’t try to find a tape of it, honey, that was ONE SPEECH C-Span never re-ran and the press quickly tried to move along from).
There were no surprises in President Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan to battle AlQaeda. There were no surprises when he went after an Iraq which everyone believed had WMD, an Iraq that had tried to assassinate an American President, an Iraq whose NYC consul did not lower its flag to half-mast after 9/11.
Actually, there was one surprise. He did surprise me by going back to the UN, and back to the UN, in that mythical “rush to war” we heard so much about. But then again, the effort in Iraq was never as “unilateral” as it had been painted.
President Bush did not surprise me when, faced with the scorn of “the world community” and those ever-ready A.N.S.W.E.R. marches which sprang up condemning him and Tony Blair, he stood firm. A lesser man, a mere politician, would have folded under such enormous pressure. I was not surprised when Bush did not. (Aside - it’s funny how they just can’t get a good-sized crowd together for those protests these days, innit? Everything about Iraq was “wrong” and everything about Iraq is “failure and quagmire” and yet, somehow, we all breathe a sigh of relief that the job is done, that Saddam is out of power and that Iraq, save a very small piece of troubled land, is - in remarkably short order (and despite the wild pronouncements of John Murtha) - tasting its first morsels of democracy and liberty, and showing promise.)
It never surprised me that Yassar Arafat, formerly the “most welcomed” foreign “Head of State” in the Clinton White House was not welcomed - ever - to the Bush White House.
I wasn’t surprised by the, not one, but two tax cuts he got passed through congress, or the roaring economy - and jobs - those tax cuts created. I wasn’t surprised when he killed the unending farce that is the Kyoto treaty (remember, the thing Al Gore and the Senate unanimously voted down under Clinton?), or when he killed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court, or when he told the UN they risked becoming irrelevent, or when he told the Congress and the world, “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.” Not surprising.
I wasn’t surprised at all to watch him - in a foreign and hostile land - go rescue the Secret Service agent who was being detained and kept from protecting him. Or to see him shoot his cuffs, afterwards, and greet his host with a smile.
I was never surprised that he tried to “change the tone” or tried reaching across the aisle to invite onesuch as Ted Kennedy to help draft education reform, something none of his predecessors dared touch. Just as they never dared to try to reform social security or our energy policies. The feckless ones in Congress wouldn’t get the jobs done, unfortunately, but he is a president who at least tried to get something going on those “dangerous” issues. His senior prescription plan was unsurprising and it is helping lots of people.
I was not at all to surprised to see President Bush forego the “trembling lip photo-op” moment in which most world-leaders indulged after the Christmas Tsunami of 2004 in order to get real work done, to bring immediate help to that area by co-ordinating our own military (particularly our Naval support) with Australia and Japan. Stupid, stingy American. I was surprised, actually, to see him dance with free Georgians. I didn’t think he danced.
Let me tell you what has surprised me about George W. Bush. I have been surprised by his ability to keep from attacking-in-kind the “public servants” in Washington who - for five years - have not been able to speak of the American President with the respect he is due, by virtue of both his office and his humanity, because they are entralled with hate and owned by opportunism. I have been surprised that he has kept his committment to “changing the tone” even when it has long been clear that the only way the tone in Washington will ever change is if everyone named Bush or Clinton or Kennedy is cleared out and “career politicians” are shown the door and - it must be said - every university “School of Journalism” is converted to a daisy garden, maaaan. We are stardust. We are golden.
I wasn’t surprised when President Bush thought that New Orleans had dodged a bullet after Hurricane Katrina, and therefore let down his guard. After all, we all thought NOLA had done so. I wasn’t surprised that he had - similarly to his actions the year before, re Hurricane Charlie - asked the Democrat Governor of Louisiana (and the Mayor) to order evacuations and suggested to her that she put the issue under Fed control to speed up processes (she did not, btw for a long while). But I was surprised that, when the press picked and choosed their stories while launching an unprecedented, emotion-charged, often completely inaccurate (10,000 bodies!) attack on the President - the rising waters were all his fault and he was suddenly “the uncaring racist attempting genocide by indifference” the President did not fight back against the sea of made-up news and boilerplate, fantastic charges against him.
I was surprised, and what surprised me was the sense I had that Bush’s heart was broken. That he had done everything he could to keep faith with the nation, and that he could not believe that in a time of such terrible need, all some people could think of was, “how do we use this politically, how do we break Bush with this?” It can’t have helped that some of the hysteria was coming from the right as well as the left. Things changed after that, didn’t they? The press and the left doubled up their attacks, the far-right went very smug, and President Bush never has seemed to have regrouped his spirit.
A month later, I wasn’t surprised (although some - mostly the hard-right “I’m a Conservative before I’m anything and he’d better serve me” types - clearly were) when he nominated Harriett Miers to the SCOTUS. In fact, I’d predicted it. Up until that moment, every person President Bush had nominated to pretty much any position had won accolades from the beamish far-right, but Miers did not. She wasn’t one of their guys or gals. She wasn’t Luttig, she wasn’t Rogers-Brown. Harriet Miers? Damn that Bush! The denouncements came fast and furious and suddenly “the base” with which George W. Bush had not broken faith…broke faith with him. Suddenly they were as willing to call him a moron and an idiot as any KozKid.
Imagine that. Imagine being the guy who has given his base one splendid nominee after another, in all manner of posts, make a nomination he thinks appropriate only to find that “base” coming out with both guns, defaming his nominee and directing all manner of insult at himself. President Bush is nothing if not loyal; his loyalty is often his downfall. When he asked for a little trust (which he had surely earned) a little loyalty and a little faith, from “the base,” he got kicked in the groin, over and over again, for daring to think differently, for falling out of lockstep with his policy-wonk “betters.”
That had to be bitter, for him. At that point Bush, unchanged in essentials, might have wondered if his conservative “base” had become a bit over-confident and loose-hipped, so cock-sure of their majority (not that congress used it) so certain of their own brilliance that they were beginning to believe they didn’t need him; that he wasn’t conservative enough, after all, and that the next president was going to be the solid, “uncompassionate” conservative they’d really wanted all along. The president who had delivered one gift after another to his base asked them to trust him, and his base sneered.
Then of course, the DPW debacle was launched and once again the far-right, his “base” went beserk, again, for very dubious reasons. Buster was the one who pointed out to me, then, that in this matter President Bush was being entirely consistent with who he had always been and that his defense of the sale was not unsound, nor unprecedented. The right didn’t care! They stomped their feet and went DU again. Even Rush Limbaugh couldn’t control them. The left, on the other hand, which should have supported the president - they would have had he been anyone else - simply exploited what they could of it.
And now, the Great Big Immigration Imbroglio of ‘06 has turned “the base” quite vicious. President Bush is no longer simply a moron or an idiot to his base, he is a bad man. He is a bad American. He is a bad president. Everything he does now, is wrong. As yesterday’s WSJ pointed out, Bush is closer to the deified Ronald Reagan on this issue than anyone on the right wants to admit. And they’d never do to Reagan what they are doing to Bush. Let’s look at a few Reagan quotes on the nature of those “far-right” conservatives, mmkay?
‘When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn’t like it.
‘Compromise was a dirty word to them and they wouldn’t face the fact that we couldn’t get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take anything.
‘I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’
‘If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.’
Mr. Reagan, I salute you. I did not vote for you. Twice. I came too late to appreciation of you. But sir, some of us have been saying the same thing to “the base” for a few weeks now. They’re still not listening. They won’t, I imagine, until they absolutely must. And perhaps it will take a staggering defeat for that to happen.
President Bush’s immigration policies have not changed materially since he was Governor of Texas. You folks knew that when you elected him, twice. He has not changed, cannot change, because his policies arise not from his poll numbers but from his convictions and his conscience. You used to love that about him. Can everything, everything that needs to be done BE done, and all as you would have it done, in the real world, a world of bitter bipartisanship and a corrupted press?
Some say that the GOP should consider “losing in ‘06 to win in ‘08.” Some conservatives say that they’re going to not vote - to sit out an election or vote for a third party candidate to “teach the GOP a lesson.”
The far-right gwwwwarks like a cracker-obsessed parrot: Bush has abandoned the base, he’s abandoned the base, he’s abandoned the base.
Ever stop to think maybe the president feels his base has abandoned him, that uncontent with 75%, they’ve simply moved beyond reason? Ever stop to think that while you’re calling the president every despicable name in the book and demanding his fealty or you’ll “teach him a lesson,” that perhaps there is a lesson you need to learn? That a good man, disinterested in merely laughing or crying for the camera for 8 years and looking to do a difficult job in the face of unprecedented hate, unprecedent speed of communication, unprecedented global instability, unprecedented backstabbing from within his own CIA, deserves some loyalty and the benefit of a doubt as he tries to bring you the 75% you so callously spit back at him as insufficient?
We do not know everything we think we know. Nothing is static; everything is in flux, and it is very likely that more is at work here, on many levels, than any of us can dream. There are things seen and unseen. Think about it.
Here is a question, and I’ll be writing on it some more during the week, but start thinking about it, now: HOW DO YOU RECEIVE A GOOD?
How you receive a good has a lot to do with whether any more “good” comes your way. The Conservatives got a “good” in 2000 and 2004; they’re receiving it very badly, indeed. I think the throwing-under-the-bus-of-George-W-Bush by “the base” is one of the most shameful things I have ever witnessed in all my years of watching politics, from both sides of the political spectrum. How do you receive a good?
President Bush has never surprised me. He is, in essentials, the man he ever was. It does not surprise me that he is a Christian man living a creed before he is a President, that he is a President before he is a Conservative. It seems to me precisely the right order of things.
You “base” have received a great good. You’ve forgotten it. Continue to do so at your - at all our - great peril.
Excellent article. If I could write that well, I would have written exactly that.
Thanks!
At any rate.......I have a better idea for you. Why don't you just start acting like a conservative on this forum?? Then you wouldn't have anything to prove by this imaginary 'debate.'
And it'll save you a bundle of money, too.
(btw, I really don't bet).
You spend more time fighting other conservatives over minor details than you do in attempting to combate actual liberalism. All your posts I've found are about the sins of the 'not real conservative' conservatives. That's like your thing. Bashing other conservatives for not being as what you think a conservative should be. You're just a real little Mary Sunshine. It would be nice if you were fighting the enemy rather than trying to control the troops.
Uh...that's a lie. As I recall, a republican named "Eisenhower" did "something" about America's illegal problem did he not...?
Reagan did not offer blanket amnesty to all illegals with the '86 Act...please get your facts straight.
And no, Dubya is not greater than T.Jefferson, no way, no how.
Of course, before you can be a "real" conservative, you must let OhioWFan tell you what a "real" conservative is. She'll make you a list, see, she'll tell you what "real" conservatism is. She's actually the only "real" conservative. All the rest of us are fakes until she says otherwise.
I 'sling' it around because I love this country dearly, and I don't want it to be in the hands of the traitorous left. There are people on this forum who are recommending that we should do just that, and I will call them on it every time.
I'm surprised you don't feel the same way.
(And I'm not fighting other conservatives. I'm fighting trolls POSING as conservatives, and the extremists on this forum who would rather have the left in power than an honorable man like George W. Bush).
I've said it many times on this forum because it is true. NO one who wants to get rid of Republicans and replace them with Democrats is a conservative.
Shame on you.
Thanks M. Thatcher!
Im not getting into this tit for tat NONSENSE game of yours. In your eyes, GWB could smear feces on the bible and you'd be the first to defend him as a "great man".
Now I went through and read all your posts because you asked me to. You need to grant me the same consideration because most of what you seem to have assumed about me is demonstrably wrong.
Yes, a few of the Bush fans are quite out of control, calling everyone else faux conservatives. What a shame, some of the people they are calling names I am sure have sacrificed a lot for conservative issues.
Thanks for revealing that about yourself, stuck.
People who vote for politicians pay them the tribute of thinking that such leaders would grow in office. Many voters wouldn't bother otherwise. And when it doesn't happen, it certainly does irk the electorate.
That's how people could be "disappointed" with Bill Clinton. We say Clinton as he was. They saw him as they dreamed he could be. And they were "surprised" and "disappointed" by his inability to rise above himself, his past record, and his personal limitations. It was like that with Nixon as well.
And it's like that with Bush. I'm not "surprised" by his performance. It's what I could have expected. But I am disappointed that he didn't do better on some key issues. It's not a question of honesty as it was with Clinton and Nixon.
I don't think it's so much a matter of ideology, either. Well, it is with regard to immigration. But it has more to do with competency and how well the administration handles things. I agree with President Bush on most of the issues, but am disappointed by his performance.
I think this conversation is over, wiz.
If you can't handle dissent, perhaps you shouldn't jump in and make things up about someone else.
You are completely two faced when you then whine that someone gives you back what you dish out.
Perhaps if you didn't make such ugly, false accusations, others would have a modicum of respect for you.
When you start behaving like an adult, you might be surprised that the adults on this forum treat you like one. Until then, don't be surprised if people respond to you as you deserve when you make childish and ugly.......not to mention sacrilegious..... accusations.
Whatever you got on this thread, you ASKED for. Don't whine about it. It's intellectually dishonest.
Let's see, let me go back (again) and look at my posts and see what I said about you: that you're controlling (well, you are) that you want to silence dissent (sure looks that way to me), that you characterize freepers whom you disagree with as "not real conservatives" (well, you do and anyone ringing up your posts can see it plain as day.)
I took the time to look back through your posts and see if I was indeed characterizing you fairly. But you're not going to do the same. You'll just hurl all sorts of b.s. and if I don't spend my time placating you, you crow that you're right about me. You're not right. You're just officious and lazy.
Shall I placate you even though I think you're actually not the kind of conservative I want to be associated with? Sure, what the heck: The left are most certainly traitors. And you'd know I felt this way if you spent a minute double-checking my posts the way you demanded I double-check yours. Sure would be nice to find someone around here who practices what they preach.
You've said this conversation is over and frankly, I'm fine with that. Now I'll just sit back and enjoy watching you struggle between the competing desires of being the one who got to say "it's over" vs being the one who got the last word in. I'm sure both positions appeal to someone like you.
You're suffering from hysteria. If you don't have meds, get some.
Thanks.
Of course, you couldn't, because I have never ever said that in five and half years of posting on this forum.
As far as my seeking to silence dissent, that's completely laughable. I started a thread on illegal immigration, and invited all sides of the issue to discuss things rationally and politely, and come up with activist ideas........things we could do to solve the problem.
It was a booming success with over 11,000 hits on it.
Bottom line, you don't know what you're talking about, and THAT is why the conversation is over.
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