Posted on 06/22/2002 9:46:05 AM PDT by quidnunc
This summer will mark the 47th year since I took my first Republican job: as public relations director for the party in Minnesota. Since then I have rarely strayed from politics, or my party. I served as a staffer to two GOP congressmen, to a GOP governor, as a federal appointee to Richard Nixon and as a corporate executive who supported in Washington and Springfield much, if not all, of the Republican agenda.
You can describe me as a conservative. Thus I am qualified to say that although I dearly love conservatives, they tend to be querulous, disagreeable and threaten revolt when Republican office-holders don't please them. So it is now with George W. Bush. Here is a president who has surprised us all with the firmness and resolve he showed after 9/11. I must tell you I voted for him with less enthusiasm than I had for many of his predecessors. But his administration has pleased me often — most notably on two issues: defense of America and social policy.
Yet, Bush has to get re-elected in a country that is evenly divided on philosophy. Thus he must occasionally — on matters that sometimes offend conservatives — dip into the other side's ideology for support. He has done so on three notable occasions: on the issue of steel protectionism, where he departed his free-market proclamations; on the signing of a campaign finance bill tailored by his enemies, and allowing his attorney general (in the words of Libertarian Nat Hentoff in the Washington Times) "to send disguised agents into religious institutions, libraries and meetings of citizens critical of government policy without a previous complaint, or reason to believe that a crime has been committed."
In a perfect political world, where conservatives are in the majority, these things would be sufficient to encourage a boycott of the polls. Either that or a protest vote for the Democratic opposition. But we are not in a perfect world. We conservatives have a president who didn't receive a majority of the votes, and has one house of Congress against him. He must make compromises to get re-elected. Conservatives who do not understand the nature of politics ought to stay in their air-conditioned ivory towers and refrain from political activity altogether. If they cannot adjudge the stakes in this election and the difference between Bush and an Al Gore or a John Kerry (D-Mass.) or a Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), they are foolish indeed.
-snip-
To read the remainder of this op/ed open the article via the link provided in the thread's header.
2. Bush still passes the legislation into law by signing it.
Clintonian parsing.
You're too generous. Buchanan fell well short of 1%.
Then perhaps your should stop imaging so much of what you accuse the President off. Perhaps one quarter of your accusations against him seemed to be loosely based on truth, the rest seems the product of an overactive imagination and bitterness. Besides, you are wasting too much time complaining about the President. Given your concerns about immigration and your own political philosophy on how to win by loosing, you should be taking Spanish classes instead.
It isn't.
Read a book.
"I would sign an executive order TODAY making it a federal crime punishable by execution to be involved in an abortion in any way (an eye for an eye)." (US Freeper Tabitha Soren, 2002)
You would teach "respect for life" by taking one (many). You're a disgrace to that which you claim to advocate. Plus, you can't and probably will never, be able to learn from history. Should you be "diciplined"?
I'm waiting Roscoe?
Denial is not realizing that your candidate did not win. As you keep forgetting, my candidate didn’t win. I moved on.
You are stuck with this President, I’m not. I accepted him as President and given the current situation I am glad that he won. He has weaknesses but he has demonstrated some tremendous strengths.
As for foisting I wish I had only two pounds of the stuff you are foisting. It would do wonders for my roses.
Can any true conservative actually state that we wouldn't be better off if the Republicans had been crushed in 2000?
When you ask questions like that you would be well advised to avoid discussion of denial, stuck, reality and foisting.
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