Will Bush repudiate any of his own policies?

by Smitty (via Drudge)

W in the Washington Times:

Delivering a speech on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, future home to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, the former president sought to explain his decision to have the federal government intervene at the beginning of the economic downturn last fall.

"I believe in the power of the free enterprise system, which made the decision I faced last fall one of the most difficult of my presidency. I went against my free market instincts and approved a temporary government intervention to unfreeze credit and prevent a global financial catastrophe," he said.

While many economists credit that early action with halting the economic freefall, Mr. Bush said the only answer to returning America to prosperity is to remove government controls on the private sector and continue to force open markets to U.S. goods.

"Trade has been one of the world's most powerful engines of economic growth, and one of the most effective ways to lift people out of poverty. Yet a 60-year movement toward trade liberalization is under threat from creeping protectionism and isolationism," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush did not cite his successor by name, but many of his warnings seemed directed at policies Mr. Obama has embraced.

President Bush:

If the country doesn't examine the systemic erosion of Federalism that precipitated the collapse, and doesn't follow up that examination with systemic changes designed to reconstitute the 50 States as meaningful centers of political power, then alles macht nichts.

The problem isn't so much the jackasses burning the broth, but the lousy kitchen putting them there. Swapping out this jackass for that constitutes scant improvement.

Say what you want about W...

by Smitty (h/t Baldilocks)

...he made the calls and stood tall for the public feedback. I've heard it said that he paid visits to all of the families who lost loved ones as a result of his decisions. You hear little of that, because W was more about action than propaganda.

One is un-confident that the current POTUS will ever grasp this lesson while in office.

Dan Riehl Rocks the Beebs

by Smitty

Dan Riehl serves up George W. Bush as an alternative to Barack Obama.

Great stuff. Thank you, Dan.

Update: PowerLine reports that, in Norway, the people there are something like 2:1 against the Obama Nobel.

Bushism and Latimerism

From a long article at HuffPo, dishing on ex-Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer's new tell-all:

For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too "condemnatory" and said, "I'm not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can't get married." (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.)

There are a several points I'd like to make here -- why did Gillespie want the president to raise this issue in a speech to college students? -- but the bizarre thing is Bush's reported unwillingness to speak on behalf of his own policy.

To me, it is evidence of a basic flaw in Republican political thinking Some pollster says 68% of college students favor gay marriage? Majority rules! This is politics as nothing more than a popularity contest.

Thus is statesmanship abandoned in favor of mere pandering. Sound policy is sound policy. One job of a political leader is to persuade the citizenry, to influence their opinions. To do this, one must sometimes go to Kansas and tell the corn farmers that ethanol subsidies are bad policy, or tell college students that their naive notions of "equality" are false.

Such arguments may not be popular, but if you believe what you say --if you are sincerely convinced of the merits of your policy, rather than merely pandering in search of short-term political gain -- your courage in defending an unpopular belief has a persuasive value.

Remember that when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," his words were intensely controversial. Yet Reagan was not pandering. Those who then suffered under communist tyranny, including those imprisoned in the gulag, heard Reagans words and felt that, at last, there was hope -- because Reagan had courage.

Alas, Bush had a knack for surrounding himself with mediocre minds, to which category Matt Latimer clearly belongs (along with David Kuo and Michael Gerson). Here is Latimer in a GQ article:

As a young political geek growing up in Flint, Michigan, I’d always dreamed of heading to Washington to work for a conservative president and help usher in another Reagan Revolution. . . .
My youthful exuberance cooled as I moved up the rungs of power. On Capitol Hill, I worked for a congressman who "misremembered" basic facts, such as the “Eisenhower assassination.” I worked for a senator who hid from his own staff. I was assigned to coach Republican senators on how to reach out to the media and entertainment world. (You try explaining The View to a group of 65-year-old white Republican men.) At the Pentagon, as chief speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld, I battled an entrenched civil-service system and an inept communications team.
In 2007 I finally made it to the Bush White House as a presidential speechwriter. . . .

By which time he had mastered the two-faced ways of the ambitious Washington backstabber. Matt Latimer is exactly the sort of arrogant weakling that bad leadership attracts, so that George W. Bush is to blame for the knives in his own back.

UPDATE: Via Memeorandum, we next encounter the nuanced, Harvard-educated, perfect-SAT intellectualism of Douthatism:

Adding insult to injury, the umpteenth insider look at Bush administration's dysfunction was unveiled last week as well, courtesy of an obscure second-term speechwriter named Matt Latimer. (Next up: Bush's White House chef tells all!) Latimer's memoir, excerpted in GQ, offers grist for Bush-whackers of both parties. For liberals, there’s Dubya the incurious frat boy, flubbing policy details and cracking wise about Hillary Clinton’s posterior. For conservatives eager to prove that the most unpopular president in 50 years was never really one of them, there’s Bush the crypto-liberal, who dismisses the conservative movement and boasts that he personally "redefined the Republican Party."

Douthat is both intelligent and a good writer, but is too transparently conscious of writing for a specific readership. He expends more than 750 words en route to the conclusion that "it's possible to become a good president even -- or especially -- when you can no longer hope to be a great one."

Arguably true, as a general proposition, but is it really true of George W. Bush? Would it not be more true to say that, if Bush learned some lessons from his father's failed presidency, he nevertheless exemplified the hereditary faults of his father?

Bush 41 raised taxes. Dubya cut taxes (as a father of six, I am particularly grateful for that per-child tax credit). Bush 41 fought Iraq but left Saddam in power. Dubya cosquered Iraq and saw Saddam hanged.

So it can be said that Bush the son sought to redeem the family name by reversing what were widely considered two of Bush the father's biggest errors. (Critics of the Middle East policies

Nevertheless, Bush 43 had that same New England WASP Republican commitment to "respectability" -- the Politics of Niceness -- which was the intrinsic flaw of his father's politics, and which is why New England WASP Republicans are a dying breed.

Victorious political movements cannot be built upon the principles of Bushism. Niceness and respectability did not bring that "angry mob" to Capitol Hill on Sept. 12. Republicans need to stop hitting the snooze button, wake the hell up and grab a hot cup of Libertarian Populism.

Remember when LGF's gutless God-hater Charles Johnson hated Bush, too?

Thanks to Basil's Blog for reminding the growing membership of Ex-Lizards Anonymous of this fact:

Many of LGF's posts from February 7, 2001 to September 11, 2001 are gone. At least, from what I remember of the posts during that time period. You may not be aware of this, but before the 9/11 attacks, LGF attacked George W. Bush (whom he called by the Molly Ivins-inspired nickname of "shrub.").

Basil furthermore reminds readers that Charles Johnson's implacable hatred of traditional Judeo-Christian belief is one of those feature-not-a-bug things:

Johnson has no respect whatsoever for anyone who believes in creationism, or intelligent design.

Basil continues by saying of the now-banned ex-Lizards dismayed by Johnson's attacks on Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement, talk radio, Fox News, home-schoolers, etc.:

None of what they are complaining about is new.
Those that jumped on the Charles Johnson bandwagon in 2004 (or in September 2001), didn't seem to understand what they were getting into.

My own view was explained to an agnostic ex-Lizard commenter earlier this morning:

As I've said before, any Christian can understand doubt, it is the intolerant certainty of atheism -- CJ's fanatical belief that he has proven the negative, that God cannot exist, and that the vast majority of Americans are therefore deluded ignoramuses -- which is intrinsically hateful.

What is most striking about all the vitriol now being poured out against conservatives by Charles Johnson is that he never seemed to complain about fundamentalist Christians, etc., when they were sending their sons and daughters to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight and die for his freedom. He never threatened Michelle Malkin, then, either. And during all the years when I was at The Washington Times, working under direct orders not to respond to the left-wing smears against me, Charles Johnson never wrote anything like what he wrote yesterday, quoted by ex-Lizard Lily at 2.0 Blogmocracy:

222 Charles
9/19/2009 1:11:21 pm PDT
A big reason why so many wingnuts are pissed off at me is because they assumed that since I was on the ‘conservative’ side on issues like foreign policy, I was also on board with the whole social conservative agenda, including all of the extreme forms like creationism and theocratic fundamentalism, the crypto-racism of people like Robert Stacy McCain, and the extreme anti-Islamism of Robert Spencer and the shrieking harpy Geller.
They made a lot of assumptions about my beliefs that were completely wrong. Now they're raging at me because they think I "betrayed" them -- when I was never on that train to begin with.

Well, I'm not sure what Michelle Malkin or Ed Morrissey will say about Charles Johnson's Crazy Train to Hell, but I know what I say:

Chlanna nan con thigibh a so’s gheibh sibh feoil!

'Compassionate Conservatism,' R.I.P.

Diana West blames the woes of the GOP on George W. Bush, with a hearty endorsement from Michelle Malkin.

Me? I blame David Brooks. I blame everything on David Brooks. If I stub my toe, I blame David Brooks. If a sparrow falls, blame David Brooks.

It's sort of a Unified Field Theory.

Well, that settles it, then

"He admires his sense of family, his relaxed and easygoing nature, and his character. He has gotten to know him during this transition period and he has a pretty good gut for people. His gut tells him Obama has what it takes to be a successful leader."

Inaugural memories

From my latest American Spectator column:

Eight years ago today, I took my daughter Kennedy to see President Bush's inauguration. The weather was miserable, a cold drizzle of sleet and rain falling for most of the day, but that was of little concern to a dad taking his 11-year-old to watch a moment of history.
Kennedy was homeschooled and, as part of her social studies lessons that year, she had followed the presidential election, assembling a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the campaign. . . .
Our journey downtown for the inauguration parade was sort of a field trip to culminate that project, but it was also an unexpected lesson for my daughter. The lesson was provided by the legions of anti-Bush protesters who showed up in an effort to spoil the fun for everyone.

Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A New Ace for a New Era notes the gloat.

UPDATE II: Bush hatred was never strictly a function of policy, Jeremy Lott reminds us:

America's elites do not merely disapprove of Bush. They loathe him. Back in 2003, when Bush was still basking in the reflected glory of his sun god-sized post-9/11 approval ratings, Jonathan Chait published a piece in the liberal journal the New Republic making the "case for Bush hatred". Chait objected to Bush's policies, as well as, for lack of a better term, his Texas-ness.
Chait complained about "the way he walks", "the way he talks", "his lame nickname bestowing", his good ole boyness and his social privilege. He admitted: "I suspect that, if I got to know [Bush] personally, I would hate him even more."

Nevertheless, all must now praise Obama, or be accused of insufficient patriotism.

UPDATE III: Everyone seems to be enjoying a good laugh at the expense of Fred Barnes, who bids fair to be Bush's Monica Lewinsky.

UPDATE IV: Kerry Pickett provides video of obscenity-spewing anti-Bush protesters at his 2005 inauguration:

Memories, light the corners of my mind . . .

UPDATE V: Linked by Dan Riehl who asks, "what good conservative names their child Kennedy?" Ah, but I was still a Democrat when she was born in 1989. Nevertheless, my good Ohio Republican wife made me swear a promise at that time, so our 6-year-old daughter is named Reagan.

UPDATE VI: "MSNBC covered the send-off and viewers at home could hear inaugural attendees near the MSNBC location chanting 'Hey, Hey, Hey, Good Bye' as they watched Executive One fly over the Mall."

UPDATE VII: Linked at The Hill's Briefing Room.

On the Bush legacy

Donald Douglas ponders the state of disrepute -- the 27% approval rating -- with which President Bush leaves office:

For average Americans, it's most likely that folks are simply tired of long and costly wars, fearful of economic uncertainty, and hopeful for vigorous leadership in the new Democratic era. Yet for partisans of the hardline left -- those implacably opposed to the GOP administration and its ideology -- the reasons for joy in the final poll numbers are many: the alleged "stolen" election of 2000; the post-9/11 terrorist "fearmongering" and the “shredding” of constitutional guarantees on civil liberties; the "illegal" war in Iraq, based on "false pretenses" of Iraqi WMD, and evil "neocon" designs for neo-imperial domination of the Middle East; and the "reign of torture" that has allegedly destroyed America’s moral standing around the world.

Despite all that, Douglas says:

President Bush is a leader of uncommon moral vision and clarity of national purpose.

You can read the rest at Pajamas Media. Myself, I think the most damning thing you can say about the 43rd president is: He was another Bush.

No one can credibly say that Bush 41 -- that is, the first President Bush -- was anything other than a patriotic and fundamentally decent man. Yet Bush 41's sense of decency was of that upper-crust WASP variety that frowns on partisan political conflict as something unseemly and divisive. There is something about inherited Republicanism that seemingly inflicts the second- or third-generation Republican with a guilt complex, an apologetic attitude.

In Bush the Father, this manifested itself as a "kinder, gentler nation," which in practical terms meant letting George Mitchell embarrass him into breaking his "no new taxes" pledge. In Bush the Son, the GOP guilt complex was expressed as "compassionate conservatism," a predisposition toward pre-emptive compromise as evidenced in No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D -- half-measures that betrayed conservative principle without pacifying the Left.

Both Bushes waged war against Saddam Hussein, the son completing what his father had started, each apparently believing that they could expand the Republican Party's appeal on the basis of foreign policy. Yet there has never been any solid evidence for this theory of political dominance based on foreign policy.

The Democrats discovered this; Wilson's World War I was followed by the Republican victories of 1920, '24 and '28. FDR's World War II was followed by the GOP taking control of Congress in 1946, Truman barely winning re-election in '48, and Eisenhower being elected in '52. JFK and LBJ both positioned themselves as Cold War hawks, but beginning with Nixon's election in 1968, Republicans controlled the White House for 20 of the next 24 years.

If there is ever to be a "permanent Republican majority" (a phrase of Karl Rove's that now lives in ironic memory), it must be firmly based in domestic policy, and that policy cannot be the sort of "me too" Liberal Lite stuff of NCLB and Medicare Part D. The GOP cannot win elections based on promising American a more efficient Welfare State. If the GOP will not unabashedly stand in opposition to the Welfare State, will not speak out and vote against the relentless expansion and increasing expense of the federal Leviathan, Republicans will be consigned to permanent minority status, and rightly so.

It is his apparent inability to comprehend this fundamental political reality that ultimately provides Bush with his legacy: Another failure, another Bush.

UPDATE: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

'Total failure'

"Every Republican I know looks at the Bush administration as a total failure."

-- Matt Towery

I will add only that Matt Towery knows lots and lots and lots of Republicans.