The Bravest President

NNow when he is at his lowest point yet in the polls is the time for those who love and admire President Bush to say so. Depending on the final success of his already successful campaign to bring the rudiments of democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush, #43, may go down as a truly great president, who against fierce odds turned the entire Middle East in a new, more democratic, and more creative direction.

But I do not want to argue here the question of his greatness (I have heard voices call him the worst ever) because the question of ranking is above my pay grade and my foresight.

What I do want to argue is that, after Washington and Lincoln, Bush is the bravest of our presidents. He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years. He has faced hostility over a longer time, in possibly the most dangerous period of international warfare in our national history. He has remained constant, firm, decided, and generous (to a fault) with his opponents.

He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power. Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

On the number-one issue facing the nation—the war declared upon us by fascists who pretend to be religious—he has not wavered, he has not bent, he has stayed on course and true.

In Iraq, civil society, nearly comatose under Saddam Hussein, is today alive and full of vitality. Newspapers and television and magazines are full of diversity and energy, political parties multiply, private associations are functioning by the thousands, most of the country is more secure than some American cities. Iraqi exiles from around the world, far from fleeing, are coming back in droves.

In Paris, France, more cars may have been set on fire this past year than car bombings in Baghdad. In the decade of the Algerian war some time ago there may have been more bombings in France per week than there are now in Iraq. A tiny band of extremists, led by a crafty but crazed Jordanian, are still capable of impressive resourcefulness and ruthless killing, especially within camera reach of the hotels in Baghdad, where the American press is bunkered down. But they represent only a small fringe of Iraqi voters—and of course they loathe democracy with all their writhing intestines.

Despite the depredations, beheadings, and homicide bombings aimed at American public opinion, and especially elite opinion, President Bush has bravely kept his focus on eliminating one by one the dwindling band of terrorists, on the reconstruction of Iraqi civil society, and on the ability of Iraqi parties to broker and bargain and argue themselves into consensus in a political manner.

Whatever American voters may say of him to opinion pollsters—and his polls are now very low indeed—the survival of democracy in Iraq will in the future count as an enormous achievement. Moreover, the exchange in Arab minds of the "big idea" of democracy for the grand illusions of the past (Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, Baathist dictatorship, pan-Arabism), may a generation from now confer on President Bush the unmistakable honor of having been one of those presidents who actually changed the course of history. A president who changed the course of history, yes—and also one who did so against unprecedented opposition at home, bitter and hysterical opposition, even from those who were formerly of the party of democracy, human rights, and international outreach.

It takes more bravery to continue walking calmly through immense hostility at home, than to face down a foreign foe, with a united nation at one's back. This, as I say, is a very brave president.

It may also turn out that, despite currently swirling furies, the president's stout refusal to be merely partisan or to throw red meat to some of his best supporters (he knew as well as anybody what they most wanted now), alongside the five interlinked courses of action he proposed, will have empowered a much more thorough immigration reform than seemed possible even four weeks earlier.

Despite a normal diet of failures and setbacks, common to all presidents, it is also worth counting up his steady, always surprising successes in cutting taxes, in reshaping the Supreme Court, in getting personal Social Security accounts and personal medical accounts on the agenda of public discussion (the first president since Roosevelt to touch the third rail and live to tell of it), and in presiding over the most amazing economy in the world during the past six years.

Polls may be fickle. Notable accomplishments endure, as rock-solid facts. The full record of this president may yet turn out to be as highly ranked as his bravery is bound to be.

If you were in his shoes, would you not prefer the fame of 30 years from now to popularity in your own time? Being popular is neither within one's own control nor, in the larger scheme, a goal worth pursuing. Doing the right thing steadily, as best one can, is.

— Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.

Virtually everyone in the US is a criminal. I blow by the "Speed limit 25" signs on Pittsburgh's "major" roads at 45mph, just like everyone else does. Nobody catches us, even though the penalties for such a huge increment over the limit are outrageous.

So that makes it right? I don't speed -- I have too much respect for my fellow citizens and travellers (and in the case of 25 MPH signs -- kids). I guess laws are for everyone else in your egocentric world. Your crminality doesn't make someone else's OK

I think of being an illegal as being similar to violating the speed limit, not robbing someone's home.

Which part of $20 billion a year don't you understand? Had any hospitals near you closed due to illegals? I thought not. You are like most of you liberals -- you don't have to actually live with the results of your positions.

Do you have more detail on those statistics? For instance, if the people with arrest warrants have them for the "catch and release" program, I don't really care. If they have them for robberies or murders, you may have a point. Same with jail time; you're not differentiating serious and non-serious offenses.

It doesn't matter. You are playing with semantics. The fact is, many or most crimes in LA are the result of illegals.

You have not said anything that rebuts my presumption that most illegals are hard workers and would eventually make good citizens because of it.

You have the burden of proof. They have no desire to be citizens -- they want to come here, steal our services, take low wage jobs, send the money home, then return to Mexico. Their allegance is to Mexico. Don't believe me? Look at what Fox is saying YESTERDAY AND TODAY.

Being a citizen or not being a citizen is just an accident of what side of the border you are born on. I don't see people having a moral advantage or disadvantage for being born on one side versus the other.

So, no borders for you eh? Did you know that over 70 million Mexicoans surveyed said they would come to the US uf they could. Do you have the wherewithall to handle 70 million? And that is just Mexico. In the world, BILLIONS want to come here. Think we won't be swamped?

You "whatever makes me fool good" liberals make me sick.

Because they broke our laws to do it. They flaunted their disrespect for our country when they did so, made apparent by their antics in those marches.

The workers I'm talking about are not illegal aliens. They are here on whatever types of paperwork that migrants are allowed to come in on, and they are working hard while they're here. If they've done the requisite paperwork, I don't lump them in with folks who've snuck in and are living under the radar.

The hardworking folks are not the ones out agitating on the streets. They're looking to make money, not yell and scream in protest marches. These are the poeple we WANT in our country, not layabouts like we have already, soaking up disability and welfare monies, and acting like work is something to be avoided at all costs.

I wish folks would step back from the emotional arguments and look at the differing situations of immigrants to this country. Not all of them are lazy bums out to fleece the American taxpayer, and lumping them all together and adopting a 'throw them all out' attitude is just xenophobia, and doesn't suit our fine nation.

I don't remember Reagan vetoing ANY budgets, which is why, even though income to the US treasury rose substantially in the 80's, spending rose even more. The biggest difference is that Reagan was dealing with a Democrat House and Senate, and we expected the spending frenzy from them.

Bush has had a Republican House and Senate almost exclusively. Unfortunately, they have turned out to be big spenders as well, adopting the "I've got to bring home the bacon" attitude so they can be re-elected. I wish more would start telling the folks back home that they are NOT going to grab highway or education funds so that the people wouldn't have to send more and more to the Federal Govt. each year in taxes, and they could keep that money locally, where the needs are.

Unfortunately, many of his vetoes were overridden by the Democrat Congress.

Exactly. They didn't pay attention to him. Bush knows that if he vetoed them, the big spenders in Congress would likely override him, too. The RINOS are way too unpredictable, and would vote with the Democrats.

Instead of people screaming and yelling about the President, they need to concentrate on changing the make-up of the CONGRESS which, by the way, has an even LOWER approval rate than the President, and is the origin of much of the stupidity on immigration we're having to deal with today.

I don't want other drivers to obey the speed limit -- that slows me down. I want them to disobey the law, because the law (in this case) is not reasonable. I say they are showing far more respect for me by disobeying the law than obeying it.

The 25mph street is what counts for a major street in Pittsburgh. It is the route I take to a major shopping center. I have NEVER seen anyone obey, or even come close to obeying, this particular speed limit.

There is such a disconnect in this country between the people who decide what speed limits should be and the people who actually drive on the roads that it's a national disgrace. It defintely lowers my respect for the laws to see speed limits so low that nobody obeys them.

And I think that goes for the borders and illegals, too. It's the same thing. Few want to enforce the laws because many don't consider them fair.

I do not believe your $20 billion a year is accurate. In any event, it's not an overwhelming amount. The State of California's 2006 budget was $113 billion. If half of illegals are in California, their share of the budget is about 10%.

The way you guys talk, you'd think it was 50%, or 100%, or 1000%. It's 10%. Big deal. And if that is the case, it might not even be unreasonable. California has a population of 38 million people. If we have 12 million illegal aliens, and half of them are in California, then the population increases by about 15%. $20 million out of a $113 million budget is about 17%.

So they increase our population by 15% and expenditures by 17%.

That sure doesn't look like a big deal to me, especially since I'm sure there is offsetting income - from sales and property taxes if nothing else - that illegals pay.

I wouldn't be surprised if illegals actually did pay their way or come pretty close to it. I think you notice the expenditure side of the equation and refuse to balance it with income. Anyone would look bad that way.

"Many or most crimes in LA are the result of illegals"?

Well, this seems to back you up:
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back704.html

But it also says policy is that immigration laws are not enforced by the LAPD, and that is at the root of this problem.

Why not simply work to change that policy? I absolutely agree it's a bad policy. But wouldn't dropping it have a far more positive effect on crime than preventing all illegals, whether felonious or not, from entering the US?

And if so, why not advocate that instead?

D

So far, I've been in this area for a year and a half, and I have not been busted even once.

Sorry.

However, I wanted to give you an update on this road, since I went down several miles of it it twice today.

Even the city bus was making 35-40 on the "speed limit 25/strictly enforced" road.

Most other drivers averaged 45 or so. I was driving with traffic, not ahead of it. It happens it's a two-lane road so there isn't much choice. Once you go behind a car, you're stuck there.

Those cars were going 40mph+.

So by your eyes, nobody was respecting other drivers? Does this mean every driver who was in front of me was insane?

I'm sorry, I think it's you that isn't making any sense. It's likely you have no clue as to what roads in my area are like.

Fine, but unless you're going to call the entire area in which I live in insane, your conclusion is unwarranted and inaccurate.

I might also point out that there appears to be little support on Free Republic for low speed limits:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1637742/posts

I don't know if you're alone in this issue, but I'm going to guess you're a pretty tiny minority.

*

I'd still be curious what you think of my illegal alien figures. I'm skeptical about your 20 billion figure, but as I said, if half of illegals were in California, that's under 10% of the budget. This indicates that a bit of budget-shuffling in Sacramento should have been able to keep those hospitals open. California companies had record profits, keeping tax coffers filled -- and much of that money was made by factories employing illegals.

My point, then, is that I really doubt your $20bln figure has included all positive factors. You concentrate on the negative factors, and I think you and many others are doing it because of a visceral dislike for illegals. That's your right but it doesn't make it truth.

However, that doesn't mean that I didn't find out things that are just plain wrong.

I am on your side on subjects like the LAPD prohibition against checking people's legal status when arresting them. I think that's absurd. I think it should be repealed.

And I see no valid reason why the son of two non-citizens should be a citizen. So we do have some common ground.

But I would react by changing those laws, not kicking people out of the country wholesale or putting a fence around the border. I would look at the problems we have that are actually problems, instead of blaming everything that goes wrong on illegals. It's just as bad as everyone on the Left saying that everything bad in the world happens because President Bush and his minons made it so!

Anyway, I'm tired. Sorry I stepped on one of your buttons regarding the speed limit. Didn't mean to; I expect most Free Republic users to be pro-freedom and therefore against most unreasonable speed limits, including the double nickel and the 25mph one I mentioned.

D

Didn't mean to; I expect most Free Republic users to be pro-freedom and therefore against most unreasonable speed limits, including the double nickel and the 25mph one I mentioned.

Nice try. Either you follow the law or you are a criminal. Because you don't "like" a law doesn't mean you don't have to follow it. I LOVE your "unreasonable" assertion. This is worse than a dopertarian -- this is just a call for anarchy.

FReepers believe in law and order. To change the law, we have procedures. YOU don't get to decide which laws are "unreasonable" and which aren't.

God, you keep reasserting your arrogance. Any other laws you think are "unreasonable" and therefore don't apply to you? Theft when you are hungry? Breaking and Entering when you need shelter?

Thank God we have a whole system to balance between your little personal view of "freedom" (anarchy) and the rights of the rest of us to not have idiots who will kill anyone else on the road in the name thereof.

Man, I will pray tonight the cops take you off the street before your kill someone who, in your world, is less than you.

"So never agreeing with the 'leftists' is bravery?"

In a word - YES.

"The WOT and the beating the Prez is taking over it doesn't count for anything?"

After 9-11 Bush gave a great speech. He said he would track down terrorists everywhere and no nation which harbored them would be safe.

Today Bush was defeated by the pusillanimous pipsqueaks in Congress in an attempt to provide aid to Hamas.

He has FAILED to protect our borders and his new "straw man" Tony Snow is stating this is a difficult problem and will take a while to solve. What has Bush been doing while everyone else has been talking about this situation for years? Whats' hard about talking turkey to Vicente Fox and sending an adequate military force to the border and building a real wall to stop this? What's so hard about putting out of business ANY employer who knowingly hires illegal invaders, seizing that business' assets and using them to fund the cost of this invasion? Where does 5,000 unarmed National Guardsmen go in defending such a vast border? What about Iran? How long are we going to continue TALKING to people who are defying us, building nuclear weapons and preparing the delivery system to deploy them?

If you want the example of a brave man, think what Teddy Roosevelt would have done in such a situation.

Bush is not taking a beating from the Dems - they never liked him anyway. Nothing he can do can please them. Bush is taking a beating from people like me - conservatives who nominated. supported and elected him - TWICE - and to whom he has turned a deaf ear. He doesn't need us anymore - he can't run a third time. So now the true inclinations of the man are manifest.

I'm no troll. Everything I am complaining about concerning Bush the Democrats in their heart of hearts agree with and would go even further if given the opportunity to undermine our nation. Kennedy is the chief sponsor of the bill which will implement Bush's proposed "immigration" program.

I haven't left Bush, nor have the majority of conservatives who think like me. He left us - or maybe he never was really with us in the first place.

Okay, let me frame this another way.

Let's say I obeyed the law.

Cars would start passing me honking their horns angrily, probably even in places where it was unsafe to pass.

Note that the street is a narrow two-lane street, which means that in order to pass people would have to drive in the opposing lane on a long twisty road with poor visibility. This is extremely dangerous!

It's very possible that my obedience to the speed limit would have caused much more damage than my disobeying it could have.

Studies have shown that if traffic flows at constant speeds, it's safe. It's when some people are going 25 and others are going 45 that there are accidents.

So I will tell you that I almost certainly drove as safely as I could by driving with the flow of traffic, which was 15 mph over the speed limit, than I would have done if I'd obeyed the speed limit.

Are you for blind obedience to the law even if it makes conditions far more hazardous for others?

That sounds like arrogance too, just a different kind.

D

"This is the governing reality the loud talk radio hosts and absolutist grassroots conservatives miss when screaming about the president not doing enough of what they want. They sound like spoiled children demanding "what have you done for me lately" while forgetting all the goodies they've already been given. And this president has given us a lot to be happy about. It's time for some people to grow up and stop acting like petulant children."

Your posts reek with faux paternalism. I see just about all the RINO's gathered on this thread. Makes it easier to know which ones you are, to separate the wheat from the chaff. The true conservatives, from the backers of a big spending, big deficit, welfare program designing, entitlement loving, administration, that we voted in thinking it was going to be conservative.

And now this, another enormous welfare, entitlement ridden, giant bureacracy illegal alien immigration bill, with the chief cheerleader being our "conservative" (joke) President. All compassionate, and no conservative. So Ra Ra on, all of you oh so adult RINO's, attacking true conservatives with your favorite label of petulent children, which in the past has been the conservative insult against Dems. Perhaps you RINO's use this phrase in order to draw attention from the fact that you are as wishy washy in your value system as so many Dems are, moderates who are actually fencesitters, and can't take a principled stand on an issue that should be obvious to any true conservative. And that stand is against the totally destructive Senate immigration bill that is so detrimental in the short run and the long run, to our country. It will transform our nation into Atzlan.

Never before has our immigration policy been tilted to primarily people from just one other country. That guarantees that our culture itself will be morphed into a different form entirely. Rather than being a melting pot of no majority from any one other country, we will become a country heavily influenced by the culture, music, art, social mores, and attitudes of one other country. Spanish as a language will become as primary as English. The drug trade will flourish. Our jails will be packed full. Our welfare rolls will quadruple, our education system will be bilingual, and our allegiance to an American national identity watered down to that of a third world country, which is what Mexico is. Thanks, RINO's.

Now, now, children.....you must grow up and become good little conservatives, rather than the apologists for a failed administration that you now are. Better luck for our conservative movement next election. We will have to more carefully pick our presidential candidate. No more Bushes. The acorn din't fall far enough from the tree.

Blah, blah, blah...RINOs...blah, blah, blah...RINOs...blah, blah, blah...you ranting loonies are all the same. Get some new braindead talking points and a new boilerplate terms besides the moronic "RINOs" nonsense. I was a Republican and a conservative long before you probably ever were. I doubt you're either now. You're nothing but a Buchananite foamer who subscribes to his neo-liberalism of high tariffs, xenophobia and opposition to tax cuts and surrender in Iraq. Your problem is you mistake fascistic absolutism for conservatism, yet probably buy into a whole raft of liberal nonsense than Buchanan boy stands for on economics and foreign policy.

And get over your Mexiphobhia. Like it or not, the economy needs a certain number of these people. Or are you dying to pick lettuce and clean hotel room toilets?

By the way, don't waste your time replying. I won't be bothering to read any of it since it's a dime a dozen fanatic posting, just like I didn't even read more than the first sentence of your deranged post I'm replying to. You and others like you, thankfully still just a shrill and small minority, bore me.

And should you and others on the anger and fear wing succeed in putting Democrats back in control of congress by wasting your vote on some 3rd party loser or not voting at all, you and the other wackjobs will be the first ones bitching about how the Democrats are screwing the nation and Republicans aren't doing anything to stop them. Now go crawl back under your rock you absolutist freak.

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