As Bush fades to black, his presidency can be summarized with six Cs.
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.
