Posted on 09/15/2002 9:34:11 PM PDT by Pokey78
The president's speech to the United Nations was perfectly straightforward. His remarks at Ellis Island were also fine: I especially liked the way, in contrast to certain predecessors who shall remain nameless, his salute to the American spirit wasn't all about him. But the anniversary has passed, Year Two has begun, and those of who are partial to George W. Bush have nevertheless had to get used yet again to the old familiar pattern. Anyone who followed the guy during the 2000 campaign will recognize it.
He stacked up more money and a bigger poll lead than anyone had ever seen in a competitive race--and then he didn't bother campaigning in New Hampshire. So he lost the primary.
But he clawed his way back and won the nomination--and then he pretty much disappeared from sight to spend the summer working on his new ranch house back in Texas. So by Labor Day, Al Gore was ahead in the polls.
But he roused himself and eked out a small lead in the run-up to November--and then, in the wake of a damaging last-minute leak about an old DWI conviction, he flew back home and took the final weekend of the campaign off.
But he just about squeaked through on Election Day, even though his disinclination to rebut the drunk story almost certainly cost him the popular vote and a couple of close states.
This is the way George W. Bush does things, and his rendezvous with history on Sept. 11--the day that ''changed the world''--did not, in the end, change the Bush modus operandi. A few weeks after the attacks, he had the highest approval ratings of any president in history. But he didn't do anything with them. And, in political terms, he might as well have spent this summer playing golf and watching the director's cut of Austin Powers.
On Election Day in November, without Saddam's scalp on his bedpost, Bush will be right back where he was on Sept. 10, 2001: the 50 percent president, his approval ratings in the 50s, his ''negatives'' high, the half of the country that didn't vote for him feeling no warmer toward him than if the day that ''changed the world'' had never happened. The 90 percent poll numbers were always going to come down. It was just a question of where they stabilized, and what Bush would manage to accomplish while they were up in the stratosphere. By that measure, he squandered his opportunity.
The first casualty was his domestic agenda. Even as the USAF was strafing Tora Bora, Vermont's wily Sen. Pat Leahy continued to stall the president's judicial nominations; Ted Kennedy gutted the Bush education bill, and their fellow Democrats obstructed plans for oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At that moment, with his poll numbers in the 80s, it would have been so easy for Bush to do to Leahy what Clinton did to Gingrich.
The president could have said that, with so many suspected terrorists and their accomplices in custody, we can't afford vacancies and backlogs in our courthouses and my good frien' Pat needs to stop playin' politics with the federal judiciary. He could have said that wartime is no time for Congress to put preserving the integrity of Alaska's most pristine mosquito habitat over the energy needs of America. Sept. 11 is not just an event, hermetically sealed from everything before and after, but a context: Everything that's wrong with the eco-zealots, with the teachers' unions, with the big-government bureaucracies can be seen in their responses to that day. Bush should have struck in their hour of weakness; instead, he gave them all a pass: The time-servers and turf-protectors in the FBI, CIA and the other hotshot acronyms that failed America on 9/11 are all still in their jobs.
Perhaps the president's greatest mistake was his failure to take on the enervating Oprahfied therapeutic culture that, in the weeks after Sept. 11, looked momentarily vulnerable. There were two kinds of responses to that awful day. You could go with ''C'mon, guys, let's roll!'' the words of Todd Beamer as he and the brave passengers of Flight 93 took on their Islamist hijackers. Or you could go with ''healing'' and ''closure'' and the rest of the awful inert language of emotional narcissism. Had Bush taken it upon himself to talk up the virtues of courage and self-reliance demonstrated on Flight 93, he would have done a service not just to his nation but to his party, for a touchy-feely culture inevitably trends Democratic.
But he ducked the rhetorical challenge. And so, to mark the anniversary of Sept. 11, the teachers union encouraged us to stand around in a ''healing circle,'' so that America's children can master the consolations of victimhood rather than the righteous anger of the unjustly attacked. Same for the grown-ups: On TV, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung and the rest of the all-star sob sisters were out in force with full supporting saccharine piano accompaniment. The elites decided America's anger needed to be managed. It was a very Sept. 10 commemoration of Sept. 11. As the law professor Eugene Volokh put it to his own students, ''Wake up and smell the burning bodies.'' Despite the flags and the more robust country songs, Bush has allowed the culture to lapse back into its default mode of psychobabbling self-absorption.
In the end, even Bush's magnificent moral clarity faded away into a Colin Powellite blur. Long after it became clear that 3,000 Americans were killed by Saudi citizens with Saudi money direct from members of the Saudi royal family, Bush was still inviting Saudi princes to the Crawford ranch and insisting that the kingdom was a ''staunch friend'' in the war against terror. This is not just ridiculous but offensive. Even if it's merely ''rope-a-dope'' and behind the scenes all kinds of plans are being made, the public evasions diminish the president's authority. Symbolism matters. The White House is for business, the privilege of kicking loose at the ranch ought to be reserved for real friends. Yet Australia's John Howard, whose boys fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan, didn't get an invite to Crawford, and the fellows who bankrolled al-Qaida did.
In January, naming Iraq as part of the ''axis of evil,'' Bush declared that ''time is running out." Eight months later, time had run back in again. ''I'm a patient man,'' the president says every couple of days now. By May, the American people were back to ticking ''education'' as the most pressing issue facing the nation. Four months ago, I wrote that if war with Iraq isn't under way by the first anniversary of Sept. 11, George W. Bush might as well nickname himself President Juan Term. Since then, the evaporation of the Bush presidency has only accelerated. George W. Bush's modesty is endearing. But even a modest man needs to use the bully pulpit once in a while.
Sorry, Mark, that's because you've never understood WRGO (What's Really Going On). You were too busy bloviating over the irrelevant peccadilloes of fat-cat Saudi princes to connect the dots.
WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAXIt's called Chicken, and it's the only game in town.
YOU CAN NOT STOP US
It is not an atractive trait of Clintonite sycophants and it is even less atractive a trait in conservatives.
After observing the spectacle of 9-11's first anniversary, is there any doubt as to the truth of this statement? I certainly wouldn't place all (or even most) of the blame for this phenomenon at Bush's feet, but I do think Steyn has a point — Bush seems to have an unfortunate tendancy of not pressing the advantage when he should for the sake of being a nice guy.
Liberals can't write columns like that. They are just cheerleaders for their socialist causes. Steyn, as well as many other conservative columnists will attack their own kind as agressively as their enemies when they feel the need to.
Steyn even admitted in a column a few months ago that, although it looked like Iraq would not be liberated by 9/11/02 and he would be extremely disappointed, he would be on the Bush bandwagon when liberation did take place.
Steyn is an ornery type. He wears his feelings on his sleeve, no matter who he writes about.
There are two issues right there that Bush coulda run with, and mashed any charges of "politicizing the War on Terror".
What woulda stopped Bush from running with these two, at least (just for example)?? The Media says what it will, but most Americans favor energy independence; and while less Americans follow the matter of "judicial appointments", it seems like an easy argument to say, "we're detaining suspects; we need some judges". What woulda stopped Bush from running with these two?
The best way to get judges appointed and drilling in the ANWR is to win the Senate in November and that is what Bush is shooting for. He is not King, he is POTUS bound by the Constitution of the United States.
The difference: The House of Saud and the Bush family have been doing business, resulting in enormous finacial benefit to both, for a very long time now. Howard is merely a politician.
But this article isn't fair in some areas. Bush was ready to go to war, he was chomping at the bit for it, if it had been up to him Iraq would already be yesterdays news. But the "Perfumed Princes" at the Pentagon, the touchy, feely whimps that Clinton promoted told Bush we were not ready for war, and we were not.
Clinton took the "Peace Dividend" down to the bare bones, he gutted the military, we almost ran out of bombs in Afghanistan, all so Clinton's bottom line could be padded.
Clinton laid land mines from the White House to the Out House for Bush to step on, from the economy to the W's missing from the keyboards that scum sucking devils smell is on every agency.
Yes, Bush has blown some opportunities, he hasn't played his cards the best way they could have been played. He's far, far, to liberal and globalist for me, but he is conducting this war the best he can given the joker's Clinton slipped in his hand. I may not like Bush a whole lot, but fair is fair.
Agreed. And thank heavens for it.
I think Bush has flawless timing. A lot is going on behind the scenes that is not publicized in the newspapers.
I love Stein, but this time I think he's off the mark. But then, I've always loved watching chess games ;o)
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