George W. Bush poses a brain-busting Rubik's Cube to the liberals of the land, and it's only right to try to soothe their upset. Why does W talk that way? Why does he say "Noo-kyoo-lrrr" when every good liberal knows it's "Noo-kle-uhr"? Why does he openly practice monogamy, and even love his wife? Why did he name his dog Spot?
What you see is what you get with George W. Bush. He has that in common with Ronald Reagan, though W is no Reagan. He is nobody but W. This, for a conservative, is a Good Thing. It's why I voted for the man, and don't regret it for a second.
Phatboy:
You are misinformed. To the best of my knowledge I have never exchanged any posts with srmorton. I believe you are referring to carton 253 a poster with whom I've had a long relationship and whom I admire and respect.
You say I "trashed" the president and perhaps this is true in the vernacular sense of the word but it is also true that I complemented him and his family. Moreover, these are not cheap shots taken after the fact as the following post, published before the last congressional election, will demonstrate. I put my opinions out there not to make people feel good or even to distress people, but to get my way so that my views prevail. Do you not do the same?
If you did not like my previous posts, you will find here much to hate:
1. Republicans are likely to lose the House this fall because they overspent, they failed to enforce the laws that would have sealed the border and drained away illegal immigration, and the war in Iraq has gone sour.
2. When the Republicans lose the house the present Senate bill will look very good indeed because there then will be no barrier in the House, the Senate, or the White House to the virtual abandonment of the borders.
3. If we lose the Senate as well as the House, there will be utterly no restraints on immigration because the President is simply philosophically opposed to any limitation on immigration.
4. The truth is that conservatism has lost its hold on the Republican Party and, whether we want it or not, we are now about to face our time in the wilderness. Blame is equally to be shared by senators, representatives, and the president. Thieves and Rinos and porkers in the Senate, thieves and porkers in the House, and a President who is utterly abdicated his sworn duty to enforce immigration laws and who has committed one public-relations disaster after another from Harriet Myers to Katrina and who has deliberately validated our enemies as persons, and who has handed over to them our educational system, our prescription drug system, and our federal budget, all have combined to put conservatism in a coma for awhile.
5. The house should pass the most restrictive immigration law it can muster and create the issue for the election.
6. The house should pass every conceivable energy measure such as drilling in Anwar, drilling offshore and around Florida etc. providing for refineries, providing for nuclear power plants and let the Democrats and the Rinos oppose them and create a climate in which the people can direct their rage about gas prices at the Democrats.
7. The reality is of course is it's all too late for this and any other intelligent policies which might have saved the Republican Party from the disaster which is facing us. Many of our problems have been brought on by Iraq and there too we could have done much better in a public-relations sense. Alas, it is all too late now. There is nothing left but to go the polls and vote for the most conservative man on the ticket who has a chance of winning. Let's fight the good fight and go down like soldiers.
That was written some weeks before the congressional election. You will note that my predictions about the coming immigration law are being terribly vindicated as recently as yesterday when majority leader Reed declared that the Republicans were not negotiating in good faith and re-instituted the original Senate Bill.
a few days after the election I wrote a long vanity which sets down why I am so distressed. Here it is in part:
WHY WE LOST
We have three important questions to answer: 1) What happened? 2) Why did it happen? 3) What do we do now?
1) What happened?
The Republican Party in general and George W. Bush in particular sustained a stinging rebuke from the American electorate. The Republicans lost control of the house and of the Senate. The agenda moves to the Democrats. The power of the purse moves to the Democrats. The power of the subpoena moves to the Democrats. The power to impeach moves to the Democrats. The power to affect foreign policy by, for example, defunding the war moves to the Democrats. The power to appoint conservative judges has been greatly compromised as has been the power to confirm appointments such as ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of Defense.
The Republican Party has ruptured the bond that held it to the majority of the people of the United States since 1994. When the polls say that the people trust the Democrats more than Republicans on taxes, it means, as Newt Gingrich has said, they fired us because they don't trust us. It is as simple as that, the party has lost the trust of the people.
The Democrats have ideally positioned themselves to strike for the presidency in 08. It has extended its governorships, Senate seats and control, House seats and control, and other levers of power. The Democrats have enhanced their ability to raise campaign funds and compromised the Republicans' ability to do so. Perhaps worse, the Democrats have turned the tables on the Republicans. It is Republicans now who are without a platform, without an identifying philosophy and without an articulate spokesman to advance their cause.
The Democrat party is extending its tentacles into the red states and the Republican Party is in grave danger of becoming a sectional party with an ever declining census and a bunker mentality.
2) Why did it happen?
America has repudiated the war in Iraq.
The American people have spoken respecting the war in Iraq: they do not tolerate the war in which they see no plan for victory but where they do see blood and treasure being spilled to no purpose with no end in sight.
The repudiation of the Republican mandate is broad although perhaps not equally deep and evidently focused on three issues: (1) the war in Iraq. (2) corruption, the so-called, "culture of corruption" (Abramoff, Cunningham, Ney, Foley) and which Republicans like us probably think of in terms of spending. (3) incompetence. (Katrina, Iraq) Of the three, Iraq was obviously the dominant factor.
In fact, growing restiveness with the war in Iraq, predictable at least since the Bush reelection by such a narrow margin in Ohio in 04, is the overwhelming reason for the Republican debacle. The Democrats nationalized the election by converting it into a referendum on the war. In the process they managed successfully to demonize George Bush as an incompetent bumbler. They defeated candidates by morphing them into George Bush.
The essential reason for the defeat was that it was anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush.
85 percent of Americans said the “major reason” was disapproval of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, 71 percent said disapproval of Bush’s overall job performance, 67 percent cited dissatisfaction with how Republicans have handled government spending and the deficit, 63 percent said disapproval of the overall performance of Republicans in Congress, 61 percent said Democrats’ ideas and proposals for changing course in Iraq. Tellingly, just 27 percent said a major reason the Democrats won was because they had better candidates. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15667442/site/newsweek/
There are many subordinate reasons why this calamity happened and it is necessary to identify them and assign weight to them so that the important ones can be addressed and corrected.
One such reason can be addressed and could have been corrected, or at least mitigated: It is quite normal for a political party in the sixth year of the presidency to lose the Senate and House seats. In some respects, it was to be expected that this would occur now. Clinton, however, was able to resist this historical trend but those were rather special circumstances.
Similarly, history shows the political parties, after 12 years in power, tend to become arrogant, cynical, and corrupt and that certainly has happened to the Republicans in spades. The voters have just cured the arrogance dimension of this equation but it remains to be seen if the corruption has been rooted out. The "values voters" will tell us in the next election if the Republicans have abandoned their cynicism.
Other reasons are less easily identifiable and more subjective in nature. One goes to the very essence of the character of George Bush. I've long published that he is not a movement conservative, in fact he is not a conservative at all but rather he is a patrician with loyalties to family, friends, and country. His politics are animated not by conservative ideology but by a noblisse oblige which, as a substitute for political philosophy, move him to act from loyalty and love of country. The result of this is that he does not weigh his words and actions against a coherent standard grounded in conservatism, but instinctively reacts to do what is right for family, friends, and country. Thus we get Harriet Meirs, pandering to the Clintons and Kennedys, prescription drug laws, campaign finance laws, runaway spending, and the war in Iraq. The conservative movement is left muddled and confused and the Republican Party undisciplined and leaderless. In these circumstances all manner of mischief is possible beginning with corruption and indiscipline in the ranks. To be effective, a president must be feared as well is loved. A President is more than just Commander in Chief and Chief Executive of the nation, he is the titular head of his party and he must rule it. If Bush was willing to pander to the likes of Teddy Kennedy, what did Senator John McCain have to fear from him? Bush has utterly failed in his role as head wrangler of the Republican Party.
Other subjective reasons for the debacle involve Bush's personal character. He is essentially a nonconfrontational man who would rather operate through collegiality than through power. This is reinforced by his Christian belief and he will almost literally turn the other cheek. So, his loyalty to family and friends affects his appointments and produce mediocrities like Brown at FEMA and Ridge at Homeland Security and Harriet Meirs. It makes him shrink from prosecuting the crimes of his enemies even to the point of overlooking real security lapses committed by The New York Times. It makes it very difficult for Bush to discipline his troops and fire incompetent or disloyal subordinates. Instead he soothes them with the Medal of Freedom.
George Bush is a singularly inarticulate man. When he is not delivering a prepared speech, his sincerity and goodness of character come through, but his policies often die an agonizing death along with the syntax. The truth is that Bush has never been able, Ronald Reagan style, to articulate well the three or four fundamental issues which move the times in which we live. One need only cite the bootless efforts to reform Social Security as an example. His inability to tell America why we must fight in Iraq to win the greater worldwide war against terrorism, or how we are even going to win in Iraq, has been fatal to the Republicans' chances in this election. Of course, one can carry this Billy Budd characterization too far and it is easy to overemphasize its importance, but it is part of the general pattern which has led us to this pass. It is a very great pity that the bully pulpit has been squandered in the hands of a man so inarticulate. That the bully pulpit was wasted means that there are no great guiding principles for the country, for the party, for the administration, for Congress to follow, or for the voters to be inspired by. If the voters went into the booth confused about what the Republican Party stands for, the fault is primarily George Bush's.
There are structural problems for the Republicans as well. By the demographic breakdown of the Northeast and the ambitions of senators such as McCain, there was no coherent Republican policy in the Senate. It is in the nature of the Senate that wayward senators are difficult to bring to heel in any circumstance and Bush's inability properly to act as party leader has given Mavericks a green light to commit terrible damage to the Republicans' electoral posture. This demographic trend is destined to get worse and the self survival instincts of what is left of the Republican Party outside of the South will only become more acute and lead to more defections. Other senators, even when not motivated by personal ambition or demographic problems in blue states, felt free to engage in an extravaganza of corrupt spending to benefit their districts and soothe their contributors. There is a regrettable tendency to underemphasize the demographic handicap under which we conservatives struggle. Here is what I posted, before the election:
Perhaps now is not the time but certainly after Santorum is defeated we conservatives must face the reality that the electoral map is shrinking. We are unable to make inroads into the blue states (these New Jersey an anomaly due to parochial corruption) while we remain vulnerable and virtually all of the border states, Tennessee, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland (actually a lost cause). Now even the Old Dominion is threatened. Ohio may be as difficult as Pennsylvania after this cycle.
Demographics will soon turn Florida and Texas away from us and, with the loss of either one of them, conservatism has no hope of putting a president in the White House
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1724335/posts?page=17#17
Bush failed to provide leadership on spending. Merely cutting taxes is only one leg of the stool, fiscal discipline must be maintained. Failing to impose party discipline is a grave sin, but Bush magnified it exponentially with the mindless prescription drug entitlement, farm supports, and educational spending. If Bush can have his prescription drug program that nobody wanted, why cannot Senator Stevens in Alaska have his bridge that nobody needed? Bush not only failed to set the proper example in fiscal discipline, he affirmatively set the wrong example of profligacy.
While some exit polls say that only 7% of voters regarded immigration as the important issue, I am personally convinced that the percentage is much higher among conservatives and, anyway, the implications for the Republican Party and the conservative cause of unchecked illegal immigration is nothing short of catastrophic. Bush bashing or not, the cold reality is that George Bush has willfully and deliberately failed to to enforce the nation's laws on immigration. Bush has simply got a blind spot here, he wants amnesty and, by God, now he is going to get it because the Democrats are going to give it to him. The only hope for sanity in controlling immigration has died with Republican control of the House. Bush's duty was to enforce existing law against employers who seek unfair competitive advantage by hiring illegals at substandard wages. Now we have upwards of 30 million illegals in America and there is no conservative branch of government that can stop these people getting the vote eventually and, believe me, they will not vote conservative in my lifetime. Bush's stealth legacy to the Republican Party will become apparent as he exits the White House and Republicans remain in minority status for as long as the eye can see. Bush's dereliction in this regard justifies every conservative in turning his face from Bush and many did on election Day.
As a result of the Iraq war, aggravated by George Bush's deficiencies in the craft of politics, (together with congressional corruption), the Republican Party is sleepwalking toward the next election. After this election we may well have have lost many of the border states such as Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee. In the last election Ohio has gone the way of Pennsylvania perhaps, like Pennsylvania, never to be retrieved. The Mountain states are vulnerable, we just lost an incumbent senator in Montana! The Southwest is even more vulnerable and with them, Colorado. We lost an incumbent Senate seat in Virginia! Florida is vulnerable as the last Senate election there demonstrated and, as one very familiar with Florida's east coast, I can say that the demographics have now rendered this area a suburb of New York City with predictable electoral results. The loss of any one of Missouri, Virginia, Florida, or Ohio means that the Republicans cannot hold the White House-and we lost in every one of them the last time around. We are on defense the Democrats are on offense. You cannot win elections or wars staying on defense. Conservatism is starkly confronted with the specter of being driven into the Festung of the old Confederacy, because the Democrats can raid into our red states and we are impotent in their blue states.
