Posted on 01/16/2009 6:31:14 PM PST by Delacon
Credit: Several key triumphs make Bush’s tenure merely a mitigated disaster. He first deserves praise for preventing another Islamofascist massacre on American soil. History will applaud the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Libya’s consequent de-nuclearization. Bush’s tax cuts buoyed the economy before it sailed into the twin icebergs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Justices John Roberts and Sam Alito will keep the Supreme Court constitutional. The D.C. voucher bill remains a school-choice milestone.
Carter: Otherwise, Bush is the Republican Jimmy Carter. This weak, ill-prepared bumbler let Washington eat him alive. Far worse, his apostasies bankrupted America and bombed the GOP into Dresden (often while an equally unprincipled, profligate Republican Congress navigated). The principled, fiscally responsible free-market/conservative movement is hobbled for its association with Bush, despite his serial violations of its tenets. The Right now must spend years scrubbing away Bush’s stain with brushes and Ajax.
Core: Alas, Bush has no philosophical core. He has a few sensible instincts: Tax cuts good. Terrorists bad. Abortion ugly. Most else is up for grabs.
In 2001, Bush initiated federal stem-cell research. By 2008, Bush nationalized private companies and steered the republic into $13.35 trillion in bailout commitments.
Bush’s instant socialism is the legacy of his Saran Wrap-deep faith in free markets. Under Bush, federal spending grew 32 percent (or 4.1 percent annually) — more quickly than inflation, Heritage Foundation analyst Brian Riedl calculates. Absent the Iraq and Afghan wars, Homeland Security, and Katrina relief, spending swelled 26 percent, or 3.3 percent annually, after inflation.
Since 1932, only FDR expanded Washington’s share of the economy more rapidly than Bush did. The Medicare drug entitlement, No Child Left Behind, two massive farm-welfare bills, and 69,341 un-vetoed earmarks are among the ghastly monuments of “compassionate conservatism.”
Bush kicked fresh gravel into his supporters’ eyes when he kept the Education Department open, increased its budget 58 percent ahead of inflation, and then, for no apparent purpose, christened its headquarters the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building.
“More than 60 education laws were part of the vast number of legislative measures that made up the Great Society,” crowed Lynda Johnson Robb when the structure was renamed in September 2007. “But Daddy wasn’t as interested in the number of laws he helped enact as he was in the number of lives those laws help enrich.”
By signing the 822-page Energy Independence Act on Dec. 19, 2007, Bush extinguished the incandescent light bulb. This keystone of Yankee ingenuity failed in some 10,000 experiments until a perseverant Thomas Edison perfected it in 1880. Now it will become illegal in 2014. If compact-fluorescent and halogen bulbs outsell Edison’s invention, so be it. But for this quintessentially American creation to be prohibited by federal law is precisely the sort of abomination the Republican party was invented to prevent.
Communications: Bush raised the failure to communicate to a governing principle. This goes far beyond his linguistic pratfalls—such as Tuesday’s reference to helicopter pilots as “chopper drivers.” Besides not explaining its policies, the administration handed its opponents fresh truncheons with which to pound it silly.
Bush and his minions refused to detail the multifarious ties between Saddam Hussein and Islamofascist terrorists. They even stayed quiet about Manhattan-based, Clinton-appointed U.S. District judge Harold Baer’s May 7, 2003 decision that Hussein provided “material support” to the 9/11 conspirators. In Smith v. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Judge Baer ruled that Hussein's Baathist government and the Taliban assisted Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Judge Baer — who President Clinton nominated in April 1994 — ordered Hussein, Iraq’s former government, and this case’s other losing parties to pay $104 million in civil damages to the families of George Eric Smith and Timothy Soulas, both murdered on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. Judge Baer added: “Again, since the al-Qaeda defendants and Iraq are jointly and severally liable, they are all responsible for the payment of any judgment that may be entered.”
Rather than publicize this federal court decision, Bush & Co. instead echoed the Left’s claims that Saddam Hussein had no connection to al-Qaeda, much less September 11.
Bush covered this topic most thoroughly at Kansas State University on Jan. 23, 2006. Bush said:
[Hussein] was a state sponsor of terror. In other words, the government had declared, you are a state sponsor of terror. . . . There’s a reason why he was declared a state sponsor of terror — because he was sponsoring terror.
When the administration found 3,894 pounds of low-enriched uranium in Iraq, Bush did not call a news conference. Instead, the Energy Department issued an almost totally ignored press release on July 6, 2004. Ditto the 606.3 tons of yellowcake uranium that the administration moved from Iraq to Canada last July. Despite the Left’s relentless charges that Bush lied about Saddam Hussein’s fondness for yellowcake, this development passed in near silence.
Bush’s Nov. 5, 2003 signing of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban (a good thing) featured Bush onstage at Washington’s Constitution Hall. Behind him stood GOP lawmakers Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, Orrin Hatch, Rick Santorum, James Sensenbrenner, and others — all male. The White House press and advance teams arranged this much-needed curtailment of abortion rights and yet could not place even one woman beside the president. Why were no female senators nor congresswomen near Bush? Better yet, why not surround him with pro-life moms and their infants, perhaps some who were saved through crisis-pregnancy counseling? This public-relations malpractice let the National Organization for Women use a photo of Bush and the boys as an Internet recruitment and fundraising tool.
Cheek: Bush turned the other cheek until both were bloodied beyond recognition. Too nice by half, his “new tone in Washington” unilaterally disarmed Team Bush against critics who devoured them like piranhas.
This problem began with reports that outgoing Clinton staffers had trashed the White House. Had Bush brought in news cameras to document the destruction then only verbally described in the media, Bill and Hillary would have been terminally discredited. But Bush & Co. covered up for the Clintons, perhaps thinking this would buy peace with the Left. Yeah, right.
When then-senator James Jeffords (R., Vt.) became an independent in June 2001, the Senate switched from Republican to Democratic control. The day before the hand-off, Bush included Jeffords in a Cabinet Room photo opportunity. Message: “Go ahead. Ruin Bush’s day; get a bear hug.”
Bush took heat for skipping the NAACP’s 2004 convention. He and his publicists could have detailed the repugnant “old tone” comments by NAACP leaders, such as its then-executive director Kweisi Mfume. He said Bush is “prepared to take us back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and dominance.” Instead, these noxious words went unrepeated, and the notion that Bush is anti-black went unrefuted.
Bush’s lackadaisical response to Hurricane Katrina generated outrageous genocide accusations.
“George Bush is our Bull Connor,” Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.) said on Sept. 22, 2005. “If you’re black in this country, and you’re poor in this country, it’s not an inconvenience. It’s a death sentence.”
Rather than loudly rebuff such sludge with facts (e.g., the Coast Guard rescued 33,544 Katrina survivors as soon as wind speeds allowed; between 2000 and 2003, federal anti-poverty spending grew in Orleans Parish, La., by 73.3 percent per recipient under Bush), the White House rolled over and played dead, silently confirming for many the despicable lie that Bush let blacks drown in New Orleans attics just for kicks.
Crawford: His ranch in Crawford, Texas, is the perfect place for G. W. Bush to disappear and never be heard from again.
— Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
This article itself is full of lies. Should we expect the president the respond to it too?
So Bush didn't whine like a little kid enough for you all? Who cares, this nitpicking is ridiculous.
Did your mother take steriods?
Paulson and Bernake are as big a disaster for this country is as the President has been.
This guy can STFU. It could have been much worse, just wait and see. As far as I can see the whole GOP is the cut and run coalition. Too many crybabies fighting to get in print trying to justify their lousy electoral endeavors. It was bully for Bush in September 2001 and now we don’t know him.
Character does not matter, this writer would be happy with a Jimmy Carter in my opinion.
ROFLMAO!
If yo9u’ve been around this forum long enough you’ll remember the standard phrase about Jimmah that was used in the early days, “he is a decent man”. How the heck does anyone here know that Dubya “is a good man”? (Not saying he isn’t, for those with reading comprehension problems.)
Nixon wasn’t a conservative. Nixon introduced price controls. Nixon normalised relations with China. Nixon handled the end of the vietnam war very badly as he cowtowed to the N Vietnamese. Nixon was way to loyal to his underlings and allowed scandals to blow out of proportion(sound familiar) Nixon got paranoid and overestimated the effect of the left on the political landscape evidenced by the fact that Reagan won a conservative landslide after a Nixon sponsored Ford handoff and the 4 yr Carter administration. Delroy shouldn’t have called Bush the republican party’s Carter. He should have called Bush the republican party’s Nixon.
Bush allowed things to happen that will have consequences for America that are not recognized right now. Alloed is the key word in that sentence.
he was not a good president, but we haven’t had a good president in some time now. Since Reagan every one of these men has worked to bring about one world government. Before Reagan we had Nixon, who “opened” China.
It has taken a long time to bring America to where it is today. Face it, America was a good idea, but it could not stand the treasonous leadership we have had for so long.
This is, hands down, the best summary of the Bush presidency I have read. Deroy Murdock lays out perfectly how George Bush just sat there like a punching bag for eight years and never had the guts to stand up and defend himself as lie after lie after lie from the rats and their newsrooms went left unanswered. Bush’s unwillingness to stand up and fight was an eight-year slap in the face to his bewildered supporters, including me. Bush’s behavior was inexcusable.
“The Republican Jimmy Carter” - - yep, that works.
Reagan made you feel good about yourself and that’s about it.
The George W. Bush Presidency will fill volumes of history books. Reagan’s, not so much.
“If yo9u’ve been around this forum long enough you’ll remember the standard phrase about Jimmah that was used in the early days, “he is a decent man”. How the heck does anyone here know that Dubya “is a good man”? (Not saying he isn’t, for those with reading comprehension problems.)”
Very good question. My answer is that a good president has to be a good man at the personal level of intentions, and beliefs and then the toughest and meanest sumbitch beyond that without sacrificing the good man that he is. Bush failed, Reagan succeeded. Just go ask an air traffic controller, a commie or a welfare hag.
Agreed!
Say what you will about W but he showed the wannabe tyrants and third world Marxist just what country was going to be in charge on his watch.
With the current crop of megalomaniacs we have out there today I am somewhat concerned what message our new CIC will display.
On the domestic front; I believe most Americans give their respective elected politicians too much credit with respect to controlling the economy. Paulson and Co. have showed the rest of us who is in charge on their watch.
IMHO
JC
Agreed. Perhaps it's time once again for that shakeup to come from We The People taking our country back.
amnesty for illegals, hence spitting in the face of the very citizens who have paid taxes all their lives, signed on to the draft, served their country through military service, and devoted themselves to fortifying it in many other ways. In other words he spat on those who served. Thus psychologically an aloof patrician in every sense.
the Kelo decision,which although a president might not legally counter, clearly is the philosophical death of everything the conservative believes in (private property), and should be so stated but never was.
GWB proves one thing clearly, the hopeful conservative President better be savvy and energetic enough to counter the nihilistic Media, or they, through default, will walk all over him.
I believe his failings were due to his kindness. Letting Kennedy craft the Education Bill, (for which Bush was blamed), Katrina (which Bush did fine on, but the press pinned on him for New Orleans' failure's, after being warned by the President).
His major failings really were to allow the Press to define him, instead of getting out in front.
But we are still better off, all things considered.
Thank you, President Bush
He still hasn’t freed / commuted the sentences of Ramos and Compean.
No, I cannot defend Bush while those men rot in solitary confinement for protecting America from scum.
If
If you 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;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son!
THAT poem, if nothing else, describes President G.W. Bush. He IS a good man. I will miss him very much and cannot watch the farewells.
It will be a very long, dark time ahead.
Whoops, forgot. That poem is by Rudyard Kipling.
WRiters and thinkers like these are the unmitigated disaster of the conservative movement.
Bush is a greater conservative President than Reagan.
“Bush is a greater conservative President than Reagan.”
How so?
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