[Vaduz]

Obama signed executive orders / make rules brake rules repeat yes it’s all obama the democrat.

[Constitutional Patriot]

And the results of their naive ignorance will be their fault and their fault alone. It's a shame that this will likely come at the expense of American lives. These leftists live in a parallel universe where reality is an option.

[Carley]

Newsweak. On the way to it’s own obliteration.

They’ll be Bush bashing to the bitter end.

Talk about GOOD RIDDANCE!!

[HawaiianGecko]

I believe Hirsch is being a tad bit hyperbolic.  "Obama intends a 180-degree reversal from the ultimatum-heavy approach of the Bush administration"   I wonder how he squares the two strikes yesterday, killing 20 people in Pakistan with this silly statement?

[MathDoc]

When the terrorists and our foreign enemies challenge the United States, they no longer have to worry about Delta Force, the 101st Airborne, SEALs, and the United States Marine Corps. Nope. Now they have to worry about the usurper dispaching Hillary for some ‘relentless’ diplomacy. I imagine that will make them think twice before they murder hundreds or thousands of innocents. And if that’s not enough, there’s always the UN. We know how effective those blue helmets are at bringing thugs back in line.

[Volunteer]

I hope we can return to the policy of treating terrorism as a legal issue and not an act of war. That worked so well for us.

/Sarcasm

[missnry]

Both men, Holbrooke and Mitchell, gained fame by ending what seemed to be intractable conflicts, Bosnia (Holbrooke) and Northern Ireland (Mitchell). "There is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended," Mitchell said.

As far as they are concerned in Hamastan they wholeheartily agree with Mitchell. They have a saying there:
"FIRST THE SATURDAY PEOPLE... THEN THE SUNDAY PEOPLE."
You may as well bow the knee to them now Mr. Mitchell. This conflict will not end until Islam is ruling in Israel and the USA.

[RichInOC]

Ah, yes. The problem with erasing your predecessor’s policies is that, as a certain retired general, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State once said in a slightly different context, if you break it, you own it.

[HawaiianGecko]

I believe Hirsch is being a tad bit hyperbolic.  "Obama intends a 180-degree reversal from the ultimatum-heavy approach of the Bush administration"   I wonder how he squares the two strikes yesterday, killing 20 people in Pakistan with this silly statement?

Or from 1996: The Iranian arms continued to flow to Bosnia's Muslims, and the United States did nothing about it, a fact widely reported in the world press. By the fall of 1994, the C.I.A. station chief began to wonder whether Ambassador Galbraith (Croatia) was running a covert arms-smuggling operation behind the agency's back. That question led to a series of secret internal reviews, news reports and ultimately to the Congressional investigations now under way.  Some Congressional Republicans have accused the Clinton Administration of undertaking a secret and illegal covert operation, without informing Congress, that led to an increase in Iran's influence in Bosnia.  Mr. Holbrooke said the Administration, after heated internal debate, chose "a policy of not having a policy" on the shipments. He called that "the least bad of a lot of lousy choices," but a decision justified by Bosnia's survival when the war ended.

This was diplomacy?

[alice_in_bubbaland]

I contacted this dolt of an author:

Dear Mr. Hirsh,

Thank you for your entertaining article! Liberals are so stupid that they’re hilarious.

I am looking forward to the inevitable demise of “Newsweak” with bated breath, since I haven’t read an intellectually stimulating article printed in that rag for years.

Thanks for the laugh,

X. XXXXX

[Bahbah]

There is a very interesting analysis of this need to “obliterate” Bush at Dr. Sanity: http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2009/01/frenzy-of-undoing.html

[originalbuckeye]

The power of Big Media convinced the majority of the voters that there was absolutely NO diplomacy going on during the Bush years. Sadly the masses believed this. During that time I kept asking why do most of the people think we aren’t using diplomacy? We desperately need more Conservative journalists in Big Media!

[Sgt_Schultze]

The more quickly W’s policies are reversed, the more quickly the Zero administration assumes complete responsibility for anything and everything nasty which should befall the country during his administration.

[Polybius]

What we are witnessing now is far more dramatic. It's closer to a liquidation, or a cauterization. George W. Bush is being turned into an unperson, like a character out of Orwell.

Not at all. The practice described above was called damnatio memoriae by the Romans and actually attempted to expunge the memory of the individual from society.

Below is a fresco of the family of Emperor Septimius Severus that included his two children, "Caracalla" and Geta. After the death of Septimius Severus, Caracalla killed Geta and declared a damnatio memoriae that required that Geta's memory be expunged from society. Therefore, you see that Geta's faced has been erased from the fresco.

Caracalla knew who he was and was confident being Caracalla. He knew that he did not need Geta in life or as a memory and could therefore afford to engage in damnatio memoriae.

With Obama, it is totally different. Obama, knowing he does not have much to offer by way of experience or accomplishments, defines himself by:

1.) Skin color

2.) Being "Anti-Bush" with the codeword CHANGE ™ .

Without his skin color and without his status as "Anti-Bush", Obama has no identity, no meaning, no substance and no reason to have had anybody be eager to have voted him into the White House.

Obama NEEDS the memory of Bush.

So, no, Bush will never become an "unperson" like Geta. As long as Barack Obama is mention in History books he will have an * referring to the footnote:

* Anti-Bush

Without the memory of Bush, Obama is not an "empty suit". He is merely a naked "empty black skin".

[adorno]

Erasing Bush

Yep! It's the pre-9/11 mentality of the democrats.

Nothing in the last 8 years was worth it. Nothing in the last 8 years would've happened in the last 8 years if it hadn't been for Bush. 9/11 wouldn't have happened if Al Gore had been the president.

So, Obama and the democrats and their partners in crime, the media, are just going to pretend that the WOT and the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq weren't necessary. Our enemies will stop being our enemies and the world will start loving us again like, well, before 9/11 and before Bush came on the scene.

I have no doubts that we'll eventually be paying a very heavy price for the stupidity of Obama and the democrats. And, we are going to be too weak to do anything about it.

[Oldpuppymax]

And as Newsweak giddily proclaims Bush to have been “erased” from American history, who do you think will make a sudden, remarkable re-appearance when Hussein’s dismantling of our security apparatus leads to the next 9/11? Yes indeedy! Blame will be placed squarely on the shoulders of that previously irrelevant, unknown occupant of the White House as the left scrambles for the inevitable scape goat in order to excuse its own assinine, dangerous policies.

[liliesgrandpa]

Now if they could erase his other programs like NCLB and the free drug program. I could support that part of his program.

[rlmorel]

This is the weakness of liberalism.

Notice that when Republicans enter office, there is not an attitude of “We are going to completely stop doing things the way our predecessor did them, and we are going to do them our way from now on.” It is usually a very measured approach, letting things go the way they did for a period of time before making changes, and those changes are usually incremental, not radical.

This is because conservatives understand that you do not need to re-invent the wheel. The problem with reinventing wheels, policies or anything else is that you often make the same mistakes the first inventor did, unless you take extra care to see why those mistakes occurred.

Liberals do not have the humility to understand this. It is why liberals are all socialists to a greater or lesser degree and believe in big, centralized government.

I use the analogy of a jumbo jet flying through the sky on auto-pilot, with no flight crew present, and a passenger opens the cockpit door and enters.

Conservatives would enter the cockpit, look around and take stock of the situation. They might look at the fuel gauge, look at the attitude and get a general feel of the situation. They probably wouldn’t touch anything right away, realizing that there are circumstances where doing something for the sake of doing something can be far more harmful. They might decide to put the headphones on, see if they can communicate with anyone, see if they can hear anything, and so on. They would probably try to find someone who could talk them down, and failing that, might try to figure out if there was anyone onboard with piloting experience.

Liberals would enter the cockpit, look around and scream out “Nobody is flying the plane!” They would jump in the pilot seat, grab the control stick and shout “We have to get this plane on the ground or we’re all going to die!” They might dive the plane towards the earth, looking frantically for an airport, making the assumption that of course, you could fly a plane from the sky “just by looking around, there is the airport over there, let’s get to it!” without realizing that is one of the most difficult things even for veteran pilots who might have the advantage of at least being familiar with the area and comfortable with trying to pick up landmarks from the air. They would dive the plane, then suddenly realize they don’t know how to turn the plane, how to apply rudder or lower the flaps and landing gear (probably wouldn’t even realize those were needed) and would simultaneously realize they had no idea how to stabilize the plane in level flight or re-engage the autopilot. The passengers, feeling the gyrations of the aircraft and knowing something was wrong, would begin to panic, and before you know it, there would be a huge flaming hole in the ground.

It is the same thing with a military campaign, an economic crisis, an environmental issue, solving an education or social problem, or just about anything else you can think of.

Liberals see the levers, dials and controls of something powerful and complicated, and instead of figuring out how they work or even if they work, they make the assumption that no matter what, they can control this better than anyone or anything that controlled it before. They don’t even think that sometimes putting your hands on the levers of something powerful is much, much more damaging than keeping your bloody damned hands OFF of them.

If it is a military campaign, they get in their armchairs and begin looking at the maps, targets and forces involved, pick up the phones and begin issuing orders and edicts to generals. You end up with the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Desert One and Mogadishu.

On environmental issues you end up with some kind of foreign species of fish that you brought in from South America to control some other kind of issue, and it ends up destroying the native ecosystem, or on a global scale, you destroy the ability to obtain energy for an energy dependent world because you need to save the existence of the Alaskan Spotted Lugwort. They determined through their “science” that DDT made the egg shells of predatory birds thin causing their populations to decrease, and viewing it as a canary in a coal mine, outlawed DDT, thereby condemning tens of millions of people (or over the years, perhaps even hundreds of millions) to misery and death from insect borne diseases such as malaria. Even worse, you end up with liberals trying to deliberately destroy industry and economies, an attempt to plunge the entire western world into a depression, and they base their desire to do this on “Global Warming”. To sum up this particular angle and encapsulate the liberal mindset on all these issues, but most importantly environmental ones, remember this quote from a feminist wall mural I see in Cambridge, MA: “INDICATION OF HARM, NOT PROOF OF HARM IS OUR CALL TO ACTION”. Look well upon that quote...it sums up liberalism in one compact line.

If it is a economic or social issue, they begin to make policy and throw money at it without even considering for a single damned second if what they are doing is really going to produce the expected result. If it doesn’t help or makes things worse, they simply throw more money and legislation at the issue, without bothering to dismantle the agencies or defund what they did before that failed miserably. In this, you end up with Rent Control (a liberal invention which destroys the availability of affordable housing), Social Security (a liberal invention, a Ponzi scheme on a grand scale that gave people the false security they didn’t have to save for themselves) the Great Society, Welfare, School Busing, declining ability of students and failing schools, disintegration of the family and soon, socialism and Third World Squalor.

And folks, this new President, is steeped up to his oversized jug-handled ears in the arrogance and ignorance of Liberalism. He is a racist, socialist and marxist. He believes it to the core, and he is now the most powerful man in the world.

We have a problem.

[VRWC For Truth]

It's all about the poll numbers. Bad times are coming and he knows there is nothing he can do. He needs the koolaid drinkers or his poll numbers will below Bush.

[Nuc1]

Note to pubbies, this is how you treat your political enemies. The next time you are in authority destroy them and scorch the earth their carcasses lie on. That is if you ever do get another chance.