I haven’t made up my mind about Rick Perry. The Daily Plunge has written a lot about the Texas governor over the past six weeks, but that’s because he’s the most compelling political development in the GOP race at the moment. Also, there’s a very good chance that he could become the next president. Another interesting thing about Perry is that Team Bush is firmly opposed to his nomination. Since Reagan left office no other family has dominated a political party like the Bush family. The Bush family has had a stranglehold on the GOP establishment.
In 1980, it was George H. W. Bush who coined the term “voodoo economics.” When Reagan picked Bush as his VP it was like picking the ultimate company man. Bush had been the head of the CIA and the head of the GOP. Every GOP nominee for president since 1980 has had a testy relationship with the Bush family. Bob Dole had a long history of disagreements with George H. W. Bush. John McCain’s problems with George W. Bush are well documented. Let’s not forget about Texan Ross Perot. Perot’s 1992 campaign was the greatest anti-Bush crusade ever, aside from MoveOn.org and the legions of leftists who lost their marbles during the W presidency.
How has the Bush family managed to get away with this for so long? I can’t say, but the rise of Perry could threaten the Bush “kinder gentler, compassionate conservative” garbage that conservatives have had to endure since 1988. George W. Bush escaped the wrath of conservatives because of his Texas accent and 9/11. The party rallied around the President after that terrible day and he piled on big government while conservatives turned a blind eye.
Matt Latimer has a great article in The Daily Beast about the rift between Team Bush and Team Perry. Team Bush is already well underway trying to derail the Perry campaign.
While in the White House, Bush 2 and his aides regularly scoffed at Perry for reasons that were never fully clear, making fun of his syntax and intellectual prowess without any sense of irony. In 2010 the Bush family, along with Rove and Karen Hughes, undertook an unprecedented effort to kick him out of the governor’s chair, handing a crowbar to Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom they judged more “electable.” Perry walloped her in the GOP primary, then went on to win a historic third term in the general election by a double-digit margin. So much for electability.
But Rove is nothing if not persistent. Now he and his operatives seem to have something close to a war room against Perry, scrutinizing his every statement in an attempt to cut his young candidacy short. After Rove called Perry “unpresidential,” former Bush press secretary Tony “Ralph Malph” Fratto joined in—calling Perry, you guessed it, “unpresidential.” This was followed in quick succession by similar sentiments from a former Rove aide, Pete “Potsie” Wehner. Meanwhile, two “unnamed” Bush aides (wonder who they could be?) issued the following warning to The New York Times: “If you’re really trying to be the nominee and want to go the distance, you just don’t want the former president of the United States and his people working against you.” (Then again, that’s what the Bushes told Kay Bailey Hutchison.)
Latimer gives Rove too much credit. This has been the Bush modus operandi for decades. Karl Rove is to George W. Bush as Lee Atwater was to George H. W. Bush. Atwater and Rove were both great political minds at the disposal of their boss. The story here is of Texas. Texas is a big state and I’m sure there are plenty of natives who remember the state before it became synonymous with Team Bush. John Connolly, John Nance Garner or Sam Houston anyone?
In hindsight, the problem with George W. Bush wasn’t that he was from Texas. The problem with Bush was that he was the son of the established Big Government GOP and Ivy League to boot. There’s no other family in America that represents the GOP aristocracy better than the Bush family. That doesn’t mean they’re evil, but controlling the GOP is not something that the family wants to give up. The next GOP president who isn’t named Bush will loosen their stranglehold on the party. If the next GOP president is from Texas they might lose their hold on the Lone Star state and Texans of all stripes will breathe a huge sigh of relief.
During the Bush administration the common mainstream media meme was that Bush was conservative extremist. The claim always puzzled me because what exactly did Bush do to champion conservative principles? His fiscal record wasn’t conservative. He created new bureaucracies, and his immigration ideas were closer to amnesty than it was to law enforcement. I knew after he left office it wouldn’t be long before members of the press “longed for the good old days of Bush.”
In the early ’90s President George H.W. Bush (41) was another evil republican. Since he lost to Clinton he’s become a statesman and a voice of reason. If there’s no chance you’ll be president then and only then do liberals respect what you have to say. After watching the latest GOP debate, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes a Washington Post opinion piece blabbering on about Bush nostalgia.
That’s why I felt nostalgia for Bush, especially the guy who was a candidate for president in 2000. Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.
Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards. To get it passed, Bush worked with two of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, the late Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California. The reform now needs to be reformed, of course, but it was a serious initiative.
And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done. Any health insurance plan worthy of being called comprehensive needs to provide prescription coverage. Bush didn’t pay for this benefit, and its structure is more complicated and more expensive than it has to be. But Bush did address a real need.
There is is… it’s okay to pass bad legislation as long as it’s a “serious initiative.” This type of thinking is dangerous and it’s stupid. Liberals don’t care if bad legislation is passed because the government can always reform it later. It’s perceptual reform because history teaches that the strong arm of the government never makes things better with more bureaucracy. This nonsense is why Republicans should quit trying to appease the left. It’s a pointless exercise.
What did President Bush accomplish by reaching out to Ted Kennedy? What did he accomplish by creating a prescription drug entitlement? What good came from the massive spending increase in education? The liberals didn’t care, but the nation is going bankrupt because we can’t afford all their “serious initiatives.” E.J. Dionne Jr. is nostalgic because he hates conservatives.
Trying to appease liberals’ Utopian sensibilities is a recipe for economic disaster. In fact, that’s we have right now. Liberals still fail to understand our fiscal situation. They just blame it on the war and tax cuts. Until they get the message there’s a real opportunity for a conservative change in this country. It’s not going to be easy but the liberal status quo and denial are the path to ruin. If the nation elects a new leader that E.J. Dionne Jr. thinks is sensible then we’ve missed a golden opportunity.
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Some see George W. Bush and Mao Zedong as cut from the same cloth, though only one was truly stupendous.
Breaking news out of Russellville, Ark. today… A middle school yearbook in this formerly sleepy town included a list of the five worst people of all time. Numbers four and five, respectively, were – you guessed it – George W. Bush and Dick Cheney! How awesome is that?
No one is sure how the list ended up in the yearbook, but the superintendent has vowed to put a stop to such shenanigans in the future. It could have been the teacher supervising the production of said yearbook, or it could have been a student prank. Either way, neither scenario bodes well for public education in The Natural State.
Certainly, Bush and Cheney are horrible human beings by any measurement, but how did Pol Pot get glossed over, or Stalin, or Mao, or even Lady Gaga? I suppose that’s the problem with public education these days. The real monsters tend to get glossed over in favor of the faux monsters… Republicans, conservatives or anyone else who believes in limited government.
So let’s create a new top five list based on who killed the most people through policies they instituted as heads of state:
- Mao Zedong in a landslide, anywhere from 49 million to 170 million (hard to get accurate numbers from totalitarian regimes)
- Josef Stalin, somewhere in the 20-30 million range
- Adolf Hitler, 12 million
- Leopold II of Belgium, 8-10 million in the Congo
- Hideki Tojo, 5 million
Why were the majority of worthy candidates conspicuously absent from the list? Do they receive their due in the classrooms of Russellville or any classroom in the U.S. for that matter? Something tells me they don’t. Most of the Top 20 rule or ruled over communist regimes. You know… The Utopian ideal where you imagine all the people, living life in peace, and so forth.
Some still believe this Utopian brotherhood of man is possible through a benevolent and massive centralized bureaucracy, whilst those who want smaller government are racist Nazis. Apparently these Utopians have forgotten, or purposely forgotten, what happens when you cede responsibility and independence to a small group of people who say they have your best interests in mind while pursuing their best interests. I’m just sayin’…
Where is Joe Biden? Oh, there he is… on Larry King Live. I would assume that would be a safe venue for Biden; however, I’ve learned that there are no safe venues for Biden.
I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.
Iraq could be one of the great achievements by “this administration?” All this time I thought Iraq was Bush’s war. I guess when news is bad you have to grab on to something. So now the Obama administration blaming Bush for everything except Iraq. Now that is some serious change.
It’s one thing for liberal bloggers, talking heads, and small time politicians to complain about FOX News, but for the President of the United States to say that FOX is like “talk radio” is insane. Does President Obama really want to go to war with America’s most popular news source? What does he hope to gain? The President is faced with a bad economy, a health care fight and a war. Why is he wasting time bashing FOX?
“I think what our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” Obama told NBC’s Savanah Guthrie. “And if media is operating basically as a talk radio format then that’s one thing, and if it’s operating as a news outlet that’s another but it’s not something I’m losing sleep over.” [Emphasis added]
Oh really? Does anyone truly believe the that White House would be wasting time on FOX if Obama was completely unconcerned? One thing I think Americans are learning about this young presidency is that he can’t take criticism. By any standard Obama has received the greatest coverage from the press in modern history. Yet, he’s upset with FOX? I can see why the White House holds up CNN as the model of centrist journalism. After all it was CNN’s superstar Anderson Cooper who was making jokes about “teabagging” and Wolf Blitzer “factchecking” a skit on SNL. I can see why the White House loves CNN. Just for the record, George W. Bush never said the word “strategery” and Sarah Palin never said that she could see Russia from her front porch. I didn’t know “factchecking” was necessary for sketch comedy.
Corruption we can believe in!
Maybe what Obama is really upset about is his falling approval numbers. If so, he really is a thin-skinned woosie. If I remember my Greek mythology correctly, Narcissus was a thin-skinned woosie. This is part of the job, Mr. President. Even President Reagan had days when he wasn’t so popular. Obama needs to get tough. Quit complaining about FOX News. The leader of the free world needs to start acting like it. Let’s start with making a decision about Afghanistan.
Our new president once promised to unite the country. Any hope of that occurring has gone out the window. Over the past week team Obama has initiated a firestorm that must be stopped. Obama’s actions on interrogation techniques are dangerous, partisan, and ignorant. I have never addressed the “torture” issue directly here because it’s a non-starter. It’s the fueled delusion of a Bush hating mob on the left. To get some perspective let’s think back to 2001. The angry mob on the right demanded that Bush investigate the Chinese influence on the Clinton administration, especially in the area of weapons secrets. To be frank there were a whole list of things Bush could have investigated about the Clintons, but he didn’t for good reason. It doesn’t accomplish anything except serve as a distraction.
There will never be prosecutions over interrogations. Obama knows this, Bush knew this, and everyone who has any common sense knows that no laws were broken.
Contrary to the claim that the memos detail “brutal” techniques used by the CIA in its interrogation of detainees (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms,” wrote then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury on the very first page of his May 10, 2005 memo. Regarding waterboarding, an August 2002 memo from then Assistant Attorney General (now federal Judge) Jay Bybee stresses that the CIA had informed him that “the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm.”
The memos also give the lie to a leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based exclusively on the say-so of KSM and other “high-value” detainees, that “an improvised thick collar . . . was placed around their necks and used by their interrogators to slam them against the walls.”
As the Bybee memo notes, the “wall” was a “flexible false wall . . . constructed to create a loud sound”; that “it is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall”; and that the purpose of the collar was “to help prevent whiplash.” If this is torture, the word has lost all meaning.
Obama is doing this because he’s still running against Bush. Obama was elected due to Bush, he blames the economy on Bush, and he goes around the world blaming Bush for everything. This isn’t the hopeful, unifying, or forward looking Barack Obama from 2008. He’s a divisive, stuck in the past, and borderline incompetent. What sense does it make to release our interrogation techniques? It’s woeful inept act by a president who doesn’t seem to get it.
Obama wants this issue to go to hearings where nothing will be done. The sole purpose is to keep this in the news, to keep Bush in the news, and to keep Obama’s approval rating from sinking like the Titanic. It’s time for this whole thing to be exposed. Since the president caved to the delusional mob the truth needs to get out about how these interrogations kept the nation safe, how key Democrats signed off on them, and why Obama has made a terrible mistake releasing the information.
I have stated in the past that the media coverage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the worst in my lifetime. The narrative of that event is so firmly entrenched that it doesn’t even have to be explained. Just look at this story from the Associated Press which is about how the stimulus package ignores New Orleans.
It’s a significant change in tone from the Bush years, when any perceived slight of Katrina victims was met with charges that the Republican president who bungled the initial response to the disaster continued to callously ignore the Gulf’s needs years later.
Huh? The initial response wasn’t bungled. What are the facts from Katrina?
1) The city of New Orleans was missed by the center of the storm. The city itself experienced winds of a category 1 storm.
2) The levees broke and people who failed to evacuate were caught in their homes. Those people had adequate time and resources to leave. If there was any failure at all by government it was city and state governments who failed to evacuate their citizens.
3) The crime reported by the press during the disaster was exaggerated and in many cases didn’t happen at all.
4) The National Guard’s response to the storm was quicker that hurricanes Hugo and Andrew.
5) The state of Louisiana had many opportunities for four decades to fix the levies. The state is corrupt and environmentalists who were more concerned with alligators than humans blocked it.
Apparently Americans have watched too many Michael Bay movies and believe that rescue teams fall out of the sky immediately after a natural disaster. The journalists on the ground were more concerned with blaming Bush than covering the news. Bush’s biggest mistake was telling a crony Michael Brown he was doing a good job when it didn’t fit the media narrative. The press never apologized for all the mistakes they made and never held the local governments accountable for forty years of bad policy. Even the clown that claimed people were eating each other stood by his op-ed in the Huffington Post. There’s a lot of stuff Bush did as president that I don’t agree with, but the bugling of Katrina isn’t on the list. It’s a modern day fabrication.
One of the more forgettable non-scandals during the Bush administration was the whole Valeria Plame affair. The whole investigation hinged on the fact that the Bush administration illegally leaked outed Plame as a CIA agent. It never happened but the resulting investigation led to the prosecution of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief aid Scotter Libby. Libby’s crime was lying to federal prosecutors. The crime had nothing to do with the investigation, but it was still a crime. It appears that Cheney lobbied hard for Bush to offer a full pardon, but Bush resisted.
Several sources confirmed Cheney refused to take no for an answer. “He went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush,” a Cheney defender said. “He was still trying the day before Obama was sworn in.”
After repeatedly telling Cheney his mind was made up, Bush became so exasperated with Cheney’s persistence he told aides he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further.
Say what you want about the Bush administration but there was definitely a stricter adherence to the rule of law than during the Clinton administration. President Clinton broke the same law that Scooter Libby served time for committing. It’s worth remember during the Oscar season when there’s a movie about Nixon that he wasn’t the only one who committed crimes as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Nixon at least had the decency to resign. Less could be said for Clinton and his enormous ego.
I always love it when pundits try to explain the economy. It’s like hearing Brian Boitano analyze college football. It seems that many have forgotten the business cycle. We had a recession in the early 90′s, and six years of economic growth. It was followed by a small recession at the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush years. Who’s to blame for these ups and downs? No one, that’s right. It’s called market fluctuations. Bonnie Erbe dabbles in economics in her “Bush tanked the U.S. economy” piece.
Here’s a lesson Bush never learned and one that probably could have kept this country out of recession: You can’t fight an expensive war AND cut taxes simultaneously without sending the U.S. economy into the tank. That is just what Bush has done.
After the tax cuts in 2001 the Unites States economy has been in a boom growing for six years. Evidently Bonnie thinks the economy should grow forever. Why does she believe this, I’m not so sure. Maybe she watched too many Disney movies as a child and thinks we should live “happily ever after.” Wait… there’s more.
There are other contributing factors, of course. The housing bust has hurt this consumer-driven economy mightily. Americans felt richer and borrowed heavily against home equity at the height of the boom. These factors kept corporate profits and the economy growing.
But the bust that has now followed was highly predictable. Real estate always runs in cycles. The last real-estate boom lasted an incredibly long five years. The president should not have been piling up irresponsible debt, knowing the crash would come at some point.
Cycles!!! She admits that real estate market goes in cycles, but what about the economy? If the current housing market is the catalyst for the recession (which hasn’t come yet, I may add) then how is this Bush’s fault?
Let’s clear up this one persistent myth. In the 90′s the Clinton administration drastically reduced the US military budget. The Cold War was over and this was an appropriate measure. However, the economy wasn’t booming because of the surplus. The surplus was the result of a gridlocked Congress, internet bubble, Welfare Reform, and lower defense spending (anyone wonder why our intelligence agencies are in shambles). After 9/11 defense spending had to increase, during the recession a lower tax policy was an appropriate response. I am of the mind that the last two administrations deserve none of the credit for economy (good or bad); however Bonnie wants to blame Bush, but ignore the good economy of the last six years.
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