Entries Tagged 'Bush family values' ↓

Ya know, I don’t suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Life is too short. And besides—I took one look at him on the campaign trail back in 2000 and immediately remembered the overprivileged Republican WASP dicks I was unfortunate enough to live among (as a not-WASP and not-Republican) during my coming-of-age and pinpointed him as a mean, arrogant, entitled son of a bitch. When Gore (also entitled and overprivileged, but one of “mine”—namely, a Democrat) lost the election that was his to lose and Bush “won,” Bush became for me just one more president to ignore, as I had ignored Reagan for eight long years.

I certainly haven’t been proven wrong. Bush is eminently ignorable, and a mean, arrogant son of a bitch to boot. Nevertheless, after the terrible events of 9/11, I was forced to think long and hard about geopolitics, read as much as I could, and ended up supporting his mission to topple Saddam, liberate the godforsaken Iraqis from Saddam’s evil clutches, and try to bring some semblance and idea of normalcy into the lives of the Muslims of the Middle East. With my family background—born to parents who had suffered the twin evils of Nazism and Stalinism—I could see from far away the totalitarian threat from Islamism.

I believed that the future of our interconnected world was at stake in this fight, that the Enlightened West had to do something to stop the terrible slide into darkness of the Muslim Middle East.

Was I wrong? I don’t know. No one knows, because no one can see ten or twenty years down the road to a time when perhaps things will be different, as they are today for example in Eastern Europe nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So that’s where I stand on Bush: I think he did the right thing in Iraq (regardless of his reasons) but that he blew it, disastrously and at a cost (moral, economic, social) we’ll be carrying for decades. Grimly, I supported the surge, too, having read about Petraeus years earlier. He seemed to have the right stuff to make a difference in Iraq. And indeed there is a small difference in Iraq: al Qaeda is on the ropes and on the run. For now. We seem to have acquired some breathing room, just barely. There is some small hope that the breathing room will grow and that the country that lays in ruins today will somehow, someday rise from the ashes. Maybe.

And then today I read this grotesque happy talk“It’s Morning in America Because Bush is the Best” piece by Bush and Cheney lapdog Ron Christie, which claims that Bush has been a genius and a hero—and that his successes are surging—and I just want to hurl myself off a cliff:

Recent polls placing President Bush’s approval numbers near 30 percent miss an important distinction: The policies and positions the president has advocated since 2001 have led to significant results in recent days. In short, the presidency of George W. Bush is surging, rather than waning, with little more than one year remaining in his term.

Wait. There’s more:

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. …

More Americans have more money in their savings accounts and in their wallets as a result of the Bush tax cuts. …

Roundly criticized back in 2001 for his position on stem cell research, the president’s resolve and strength to draw a moral boundary line to protect innocent unborn life has been vindicated. …

And most deluded of all, a happy picture of Iraq:

This decrease in violence has led thousands of civilians to return to the country each and every day to reopen their schools, businesses and neighborhoods that have long been abandoned due to violence.

In Mosul, the airport opened for the first time in 14 years for commercial aviation flights. In a region of the country long associated with violence, Iraqi Airlines is now open for business. While there is always a potential for violence to flare up, Iraqi civilians have returned home to provinces all around the country that had previously been strongholds held by terrorists and Saddam loyalists.

[e.a.]

I didn’t buy Frank Rich’s argument that Bush went to war in Iraq in order to secure a victory (and thus the 2004 election): there was ample reason to go to war, and many liberals understood those reasons and supported them.

But to hear a former Bush administration lapdog now declare victory is beyond sick-making. Words fail me. Hear me whimper.

George W. Bush is well-read, according to Daniel Johnson:

So how does this distinguished historian [Andrew Roberts] think President Bush compares to his predecessors? “He’s an amazingly well-read man, contrary to the way he’s portrayed in the media,” Roberts told the Daily Telegraph.

This chimes with the experience of my father, Paul Johnson, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Mr. Bush last December. In his eulogy, the President listed a few of my father’s many books and added, with typically self-deprecating irony, “I’ve read them all, of course.” The audience laughed, but it emerged in conversation that he actually had read some of them. Like Reagan, whose reading—including Modern Times, my father’s history of the world since 1917—encouraged him to persevere in his mission to win the cold war, George W. Bush has been strengthened by books in his determination not to give up in the war on terror.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we get to the part where you just want to throw up [e.a.]:

Is it only the natural modesty of this President that leads him to wear his erudition so lightly that a cynical intelligentsia assumes that he has never opened a book? Or is it native cunning? Far better to be “misunderestimated” by your enemies than to flaunt your academic prowess …

This president is in a major player the Swims with International Sharks game. When you’re swimming with any sharks, the first rule is to play the game that’s being played, not the game you wish were being played.

All that history and biography reading being done by GWB? Well: it’s the Swimming with Sharks literature for the presidential set (including the hopefuls: why do you think Rudy Giuliani showed such familiarity with Winston Churchill on 9/11?), to see how those other guys did it.

It hardly requires a crystal ball to see that he will rarely crack a book again after he leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Oh no! How do we account for this?

According to CNN, six in ten Americans think George H.W. Bush (that’s “41″) is a better president than Dubya (that’s “43″):

 Six in 10 said the elder Bush, who served one term from 1989-1993, did a better job in office, according to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation.

Poppy isn’t having any of it, though. In Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, George Herbert Walker Bush took on his son’s Arab critics. Took them on face-to-face:

“We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he’s doing all over the world,” a woman in the audience bluntly told Bush after his speech.

Bush, 82, appeared stunned as others in the audience whooped and whistled in approval.

A college student told Bush his belief that U.S. wars were aimed at opening markets for American companies and said globalization was contrived for America’s benefit at the expense of the rest of the world. Bush was having none of it.

“I think that’s weird and it’s nuts,” Bush said. “To suggest that everything we do is because we’re hungry for money, I think that’s crazy. I think you need to go back to school.“

For what it’s worth, I agree with Poppy: it is weird and nuts. It’s also, however, what they learn in school.

Not to mention from the American press and American Bush critics. But, hey, who’s paying attention?