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.
I have no idea, they live in a world where logistics play no part. You just blink and all the men and Armor and fule and food and ammo and missiles are in place and ready to go.
Far from it.
If you havae evidence of Saudi money finding its way to President Bush's pocket, I'd like to see it. Otherwise, I'd like you to withdraw your comment. Fair enough, right?
Take the Homeland Security bill, for example. The worker flexibility issue should be an easy slam-dunk for the administration, but instead they seem to be allowing Daschle to run around calling it a "power grab" without a sufficiently outraged response. The simple answer, which should be shouted from the rooftops until Daschle is embarrassed into shutting up, is that the Democrats are putting the security of their union buddies' jobs before the security of the nation. It's short, pithy and true. Nevertheless, it appears that the Democrats may force Bush to veto the whole damned bill over the issue, or sign it without the increased flexibility — a loss in either case.
Your first point would be valid if the plan was not try terrorists, except for US citizens, before military tribunals and I doubt that any realistic estimate of citizen terrorists would be high enough to be used as a justification for more Judges.
I agree on the domestic oil issue though.
I'm not suggesting that you have said anything out of line here in expressing your opinions ......
..... but I would like to ask everyone not to sidetrack the current discussion with that issue.
Now who might that be?
We have to win domestic issues on domestic merits.
Well now we know why the Prince was in Crawford, Texas. It wasn't to give Bush money so it must have been for Bush to read him the riot act and mention Qatar a few dozen times.
Actually I thought it was part of the article, or at least part of the reasons that the author thought Bush has blown it, offensive relations with Muslim types, but ok, no biggy.
The Bush oil "fortune" was made in West Texas NOT Saudi Arabia. The Bush oil ties are with the DOMESTIC oil interests. If Bush were to "line his pockets" it would be by driving oil to 50 bucks a barrel to make domestic drilling and production viable. Get it?
The Prince was told that we are moving our Force Command to Qatar and that we will be enlarging our military presence there. We are indeed moving our Command Post to Qatar and the House of Saud is getting the message. See the link above.
Saudi Arabia is not the oil industry. I know of no money that has flowed from Saudi to GWB and I don't think you do either.
I am in the xray business but GE doesn't sand me any of their scanner profits.
Have another beer.
Bush can't force Daschle to do anything. It simply can't be done without overwhelming public opinion and despite what you think Bush can not do it by giving daily press conferences.
The WOT is a bigger issue right now than Judge Owens or the ANWR and conflating the two is a really bad idea.
Jack, this is what you said. Just retract it and done. Its not true.
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