Posted on 05/16/2002 9:10:34 PM PDT by Pokey78
Edited on 04/23/2004 12:04:29 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The president sacrifices whatever he must to win the war--just as FDR did.
Let me tell you what I think of the criticism that President Bush (a) reversed a half century of Republican philosophy on free trade and caved in on tariffs, and (b) accepted and endorsed a big-government farm bill that was so greasy, pork-filled and fat-laden that if you took the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 in your hand and held a match to it would hiss, pop and sizzle like bacon in a big black skillet.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
"Your hyberbole-laced righteous indignation against political parties in general and Republicans in particular is noted. I'm sure you're a rugged individualist of the first order but near-hysterical rants such as the one quoted above don't really cut it.
One man's read as hysteria is another man's read as tongue in cheek sarcasm. Dark sarcastic humor is more my forte; read: "Thanks for taking me in hand and calming me down".
"Being angry at and distrustful of politicians is fine but constant ranting with no solutions and no apparent understanding how politics 'works' is useless.
Listing the betrayals to conservative principles as evidence of why I won't be voting for Bush again, is ranting? You have yet to list his accomplishments, and as far as offering a solution, I have determined mine, writing in my candidate.
"That Bush is doing a fine job in a very, very tough position seems to elude most who just see what he didn't do to please them and fill out their personal agenda this week.
You all talk about the fine job Bush is doing, I must have blinked and missed it. Please I'm hungry for the details of the marvels of conservatism he has accomplished. My personal agenda this week? ROFL... Spin, thy home is found in both Republican and Demoncrat houses.;o)
"Calm down with the wild attacks and sneering asides to anyone who doesn't believe you have all the answers or that our President is a monster"
Attacks? Sneering asides? Let me check again, but I think it is rather my pants cuffs that are frayed here. But that's ok. I didn't say Bush is a monster, I said he is a soverignty assassin, one of many in both parties, if you're refering to all the betrayals of conservative principles he has preformed that I have listed, well I'm just sorry, he did them and will have to stand on his on disgraceful merits.
I think compromised principles has us where we are today, for me it is an unhappy place to be. Things may be just hunky dory as far as you are concerned, you may be delighted that immigrants are back on welfare, who knows. You know who Fox News says has both parties worried? The independent's like me, no one ever knows which way they will jump, I don't either, independents run the spectrum. It's critical for each party which way we vote and my vote is not going to come cheap.
Sure my principles and ideals are called outdated, not compatible with the new way. But I look at it this way, if that is the case, and I can no longer expect the basic right to secure borders, even at a time when terrorists are breathing down our necks, sane immigration, if I can no longer expect not to be illegally invaded or legally invaded by the hordes from the south, north, east and west neither party can offer me a just compensation. If a candidate can no longer be elected on conservative principles and has to sneak, debase himself, fool the masses, take ten steps in socialist policies to make a half step in conservative policies, isn't it pretty much all over anyway?
So that leaves people like me to be the itch that can't be scratched, the fly in the ointment, because we stubbornly believe that with the right conservative candidate, all those people out there who don't vote, will dash off their registration forms and hit the voters booth. Tell me the truth, do you think, if a Presidential candidate, who is not extreme in any direction stood up tomorrow and said, "America needs a break from immigration, America needs to deal with it's illegal immigrant situation, American needs solid and secure borders." that people would not have car wrecks getting to the polls?
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"MONTERREY, Mexico: ----- ------- yesterday said Americans are duty-bound to 'share our wealth' with poor nations and promised a 50 percent increase in foreign aid, but 'We should give more of our aid in the form of grants, rather than loans that can never be repaid,' he said. 'We should invest in better health and build on our efforts to fight AIDS, which threatens to undermine whole societies.'
"In addition to the moral, economic and strategic imperatives of increasing foreign aid, ----- ------- said, it could also help in the war against terrorism.
"'We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize and try to turn to their advantage.'"
Here's a small political quiz. Who is quoted above?
a) George McGovern
b) Bill Clinton
c) Al Gore
d) Al Sharpton
e) Jesse Jackson
f ) Ted Kennedy
g) George W. Bush
Hint: He's very popular here at Free Republic.
"What I refer to are the claims that Bush is "Just like Gore" or, my 'favorite': "Worse than Clinton" and to some here, the embodiment of the RINO. The broad-brush ploy. "He's a traitor to the conservative base". I disagree.I dare say that nobody on this thread has said "worse than Gore" or "as bad as Clinton." If they had, I'd defend it by saying that Gore and Clinton are every bit the liberal statists they claim to be, while our president is certainly not the conservative he claims to be. Hipocrisy is no less a sin because it's committed by a Republican.
"...to some Bush-bashers on FR, everything the man does is wrong and somehow, a betrayal and a sell-out.
To virtually all of the "My Party Right or Wrong" Republicans, any criticism of der President is verboten and characterized as bordering on treason.
"...the DNC trolls wearing the 'conservative' disguise aside - this constant harping and complaining needs some balance with the reality of the Bush presidency and his handling of a myriad of difficult situations, a hostile media (the N.Y. Post BUSH KNEW! headline is a fine example of this) and an obstructionist Democrat opposition in Congress.
Then explain why the most liberal policies put forth by the GWB administration have not been the result of strategic losses to the dems, but the result of proactive GWB administration policies. There simply was no "obstructionist Democrat opposition" that would mitigate CPR, the Farm bill, the NCLB Education bill, Mineta's Follies, and the continued politicization of junk science and rampant Marxist feminism at HHS. It appears that the Republicans have bought the liberal lie that all conflict is bad conflict unless begun by a democrat.
"What's disingenuous is the mention of Rush Limbaugh."
Nonsense. I'm not a real big Limbaugh fan, but when he says that "Bush is putting forth the Democrats' agenda for them," he's calling it as many people are seeing it.
"President Bush is fair game for criticism from conservatives on some issues but he is not a political traitor or the 'socialist' (and other nonsensical labels) the diehards try to pin on him. That kind of smear is what I oppose and I'll continue to do so. It's disingenuous, at best. A deliberate lie, at worst."
The criticism of Bush is nowhere near as hyperbolic as calling anyone who dares find fault with GWB a "Bush-basher."
"I'll grant you the farm, education and campaign reform bills were correctly identified as 'liberal'. The President signed them for political reasons but the criticism from conservatives is justified on that count."
Funny how anybody who says exactly that without putting it behind at least three sycophantic paragraphs in praise of GWB gets called a "Bush-basher."
The World War II "duration" was a period of domestic deprivation (rationing, shortages, high accident rates on the job, wage controls, etc.) Prosperity only returned beginning 1945 when the federal government massively demobolized, cut spending, allowed real wages to fall, and cut taxes. In short, economic prosperity returned because the federal government pursued fundamentally anti-Keynesian policies in the late 1940s including a massive decline in governmental purchase and cuts in the deficit and federal spending.
As to FDR giving the people "hope," many other unsavory characters in history can also make that claim. The hard truth is that his anti-depression failures from top to the bottom.
The best source on this is Richard Vedder, Out of Work. Vedder is an economic historian at Ohio state.
Harrison, I don't have time to chew this one over a dozen times so I'll make it easy and leave you the last word, a la O'Reilly. That knee jerks two ways. Some folks will bash Bush for anything he does that doesn't fit some ultra-rightist profile. Typical example: Bush appointed a gay man to some AIDS office. Pure PR but no, some Bush-bashers were proclaiming that Bush was 'in bed with the homos' and was promoting homosexuality. Please. This kind of hyperbole discredits many of these very threrads.
A hint: Because it doesn't appear on this thread doesn't mean a statement was not made. 'Worse than Clinton' is one of those.
Have fun.
Apparently not.
This is a common mistake. It is one being repeated by the Republican party in 2000. Republican and political amateurs tell me daily that the only important thing is to get the Clintons and Gores out of the White House. Nothing could be further from the truth and this thinking is an ultimate deathtrap. Without a highly articulate spokesman advancing a well thought out broad agenda, winning an election is an ultimate disaster during which your opposition gets a rest period while the world watches your candidate prove the criticisms the opposition made during their election campaign. You lose leverage during your own term in office because of internal organizational dissension and directionlessness. You've simultaneously undermined your ideological and political strength in future elections. Winning an election with an incompetent or compromising or compromised candidate is deferred suicide.
The worst thing that can happen is to win an election with someone who is too incompetent, or is reluctant, to confront and refute your ideological enemy. It makes a better case for the view that the enemy is so correct as to be unrefutable than the enemy could make by himself. Ideological silence or ineptitude confers an image of indominitability, immortality, invulnerability, and permission upon the opposition. The message given is that the only thing your presidential candidate can do is lamely apologize by embarrassed silence for not adopting the ideology of the political left. Your supporters are betrayed to find when they vote against the opposition they still have no voice and the opposition remains the dominant political voice.
In subsequent elections that image of indominitability and permission are used against you. The ideological weaknesses of your weak previous office-holder are declared by the radical left opposition to be the wise valid positions of your party, while deviation from weaknesses and attempts to correct them are labeled extremism. A competent new candidate in your party is nearly mortally crippled by needing to spend as much time and effort refuting or reversing the silent ineptitude and embarrassment of the previous officeholder from his own party as he does making a rational ideological case. This allows the opposition the opportunity to present your candidate as being a divergent radical within his own party for saying what the previous candidate or officeholder was too inept or disinclined to say.
Concurrently, you find your own political party has become a comfortable nesting place for an influx of weaklings and trash now promoting and attempting to extend the agreeable softness and weakness of weak predecessors.
It must be understood there absolutely is no such thing as a moderate or center position in politics where there is a radical left. Any time your candidate moves half way to accommodate or make peace with the left, the left responds by moving farther left, which then moves the middle point farther left. Consequently, in the last 40 years moderation and middle ground have been moving targets receding leftward at the speed of light as so-called moderates and peacemakers desperately and lamely pursue the endlessly moving average set and reset by ever-increasing radicalism and pathology on the left. The shift has been such that the leftist position of 40 years ago is now called right-wing extremism.
Electing peacemakers and "nice guys" in dealing with the radical left is the equivalent of quitting the antibiotic medication which is fighting an infection threatening to turn into gangrene. The infection gains strength while unopposed, and your political party or next presidential candidate faces the future having lost an arm or a leg.
This is one of the things that happened with George Bush senior. He was elected in the mistaken wish that he would have the same personal force and direction as Reagan. Instead, Bush's pleasant blandness, his timidity and/or incapacity in confronting the political left, his failure to articulate an agenda and analysis, lost the conservative momentum and brought catastrophe upon the Republican Party and the nation, culminating in the ascendancy of the Clintons. The economic condition was horrible in 1992 and strongly affected the election; but with the exception of the period just after winning the Gulf war, the Bush presidency was also directionless and without incisive forceful voice from the start because of George Bush's failure to confront the lifestyle and political left.
Like many others in the Republican party, George Bush's views of politics and the presidency were hopelessly obsolete and were based upon the long bygone days before the convoluted titanic struggle with radical socialism and rationalized borderline psychotic counterculturalism in America. Bush seemed to lack any awareness that such a struggle even existed, or of its seriousness. And probably, in his limited world, it didn't exist. This was much of Bush's failure, assuming his intent was oriented toward a free society. It is a condition seemingly shared by his son. It was also, incidentally, the failure of Bob Dole.
From Politics in America, a irrefutable explanation of how and why the barbarians took the gates and imperiled civilization.
The series is definitely worth the time it takes to read and digest it.
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I never made the statement that I liked or agreed with FDR.
He ain't his father.
Tell ya what. Let's wait and see the results of the November election. If the GOP regains the Senate and keeps the House, my guess is that you will see a rightward tilt.
We shall see, right? If this does not occur, then will the criticisms prove correct (and I will compare/contrast Dubya's actions with those of Reagan when he had the other party in power). I am man enough to say admit as much.
Deal?
Being a know-it-all, PIA, cranky curmudgeon who talks like he eats a dictionary for breakfast every morning is a big part of the solution. Having great PR skills, looking good on TeeVee, and being fun at parties is a big part of the problem. This sort of conciliatory and unconditionally supportive personality pattern validates and enables our worst enemies. Calling a sadistic schemer with diabolical cunning exactly that is a minimum requirement for progress. Confrontation, not conciliation, is the order of the day, or should be.
You're not actually surprised, are you?
Cheap politicians always protect each other. It's how they keep the game going.
Please support the President and side with the survival of our nation. Anything else is treason, Harry, for this is war.
During times of war, some liberties are temporarily curtailed. That is part of war.
We are at war. This is a long and costly war, and grandstanding and spinning for one's own advancement is despicable.
Miss Marple, are you and Peggy penpals? The similarities are eerie, and that was only one thread. I could find more...
The problem I see with Kensian economics is several fold. It allows a socialistic system in which individual determination is displaced by government programs. Over the long haul this produces a soft parasitic underclass that makes increasing demands on the government and fellow citizens which become perpetuating and destructive. That is, it puts people on government programs and pays the cost later in inflated funny-money. In addition to social deterioration there is an inflationary element that can get out of hand with destructive consequences. An entire analysis is too long to go into here.
The wild card in all of this is the possibility of a Perot redux. A 3rd party candidate getting 20 million votes could cost Bush reelection. This is truly scary. And to all the Bush-bashers, don't complain about anything if he loses. You will have helped the opposition succeed, and this nation will suffer for it.
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