All Posts Tagged With: "George W. Bush"

Neal Gabler:

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party’s presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan’s fallen standard and “conservatized” government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That’s how the story goes.

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn’t begin with Goldwater and doesn’t celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party’s past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon.

The basic problem with the Goldwater tale is that it focuses on ideology and movement building, which few voters have ever really cared about, while the McCarthy tale focuses on electoral strategy, which is where Republicans have excelled.

Read his entire column here.

“George W. Bush hopes history will see him as a president who liberated millions of Iraqis and Afghans, who worked towards peace and who never sold his soul for political ends,” reports AFP (via Breitbart.com).

“I’d like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” Bush said in excerpts of a recent interview released by the White House Friday.

“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values.”

He may get his wish, but not necessarily exactly as he hopes for. He will certainly be remembered, but I doubt it will be a a great liberator or one he “helped achieve piece.” He may be right that his values haven’t changed since coming to Washington; unfortunately for the rest of us, those values should have been left at his home in Texas. Those values brought us arguably the worst presidency ever.

In a survey of 109 professional historians conducted last spring by George Mason University’s History News Network, 107 rated George W. Bush’s presidency a failure. Sixty-one percent concluded that his presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Here are a few of the specific comments by some of these historians Continued

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Ken Silverstein looks at who’s earned one of W’s recent pardons:

President George W. Bush has not thus far granted many pardons, but he has been generous in coming to the aid of one particular constituency group: S&L executives and others who swindled thrifts in the mid-1980’s. A few of these guys, coincidentally no doubt, hale from Texas.

… So Bush is handing out pardons to a group of people who helped produce the last financial system meltdown just as a new crop are under investigation.

Seems like par for the course.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday that he believes “the new administration is off to a good start.”

“They’re saying, in my view, all the right things … that they want to govern in the middle and tackle big things.”

McConnell added a cautionary note: “It would not be a good idea for the new administration … to go down a laundry list of left-wing proposals and try to jam them through.”

“I don’t anticipate they’re going to do that. I’m hoping for the best,” McConnell said.

The GOP senator also said he was glad to see the current president get ready to leave.

“Our members, in one way, are kind of relieved by the departure of an administration that became unpopular and made it very difficult for us to compete.”

Dick Morris:

Will Obama govern from the left? He doesn’t have to. George W. Bush has done all the heavy lifting for him. It was under Bush that the government basically took over as the chief stockholder of our financial institutions and under Bush that we ceded our financial controls to the European Union. In doing so, he has done nothing to preserve what differentiates the vibrant American economy from those dying economies in Europe. Why have 80 percent of the jobs that have been created since 1980 in the industrialized world been created in the United States? How has America managed to retain its leading 24 percent share of global manufacturing even in the face of the Chinese surge? How has the U.S. GDP risen so high that it essentially equals that of the European Union, which has 50 percent more population? It has done so by an absence of stifling regulation, a liberation of capital to flow to innovative businesses, low taxes, and by a low level of unionization that has given business the flexibility to grow and prosper. Europe, stagnated by taxation and regulation, has grown by a pittance while we have roared ahead. But now Bush — not Obama — Bush has given that all up and caved in to European socialists.

The Bush legacy? European socialism. Who needs enemies with friends like Bush?

George W. Bush has certainly made his mark on history. His legacy is now cemented as “the most unpopular president since approval ratings were first sought more than six decades ago.”

Seventy-six percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday disapprove of how President Bush is handling his job.

That’s an all-time high in CNN polling and in Gallup polling dating back to World War II.

“No other president’s disapproval rating has gone higher than 70 percent. Bush has managed to do that three times so far this year,” says CNN polling director Keating Holland. “That means that Bush is now more unpopular than Richard Nixon was when he resigned from office during Watergate with a 66 percent disapproval rating.”

Before Bush, the record holder for presidential disapproval was Harry Truman, with a 67 percent disapproval rating in January of 1952, his last full year in office.

That’s a heckava job, Bushie.

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter and policy advisor to President Bush, writes a fantastical — as in “imaginary or groundless in not being based on reality; foolish or irrational” — puff piece about his former boss and that boss’ legacy. He lauds the “great,” yet under-appreciated, achievements of the outgoing president that demonstrate his humanity.

These achievements, it is true, have limited constituencies to praise them. Many conservatives view Medicare, education reform and foreign assistance as heresies. Many liberals refuse to concede Bush’s humanity, much less his achievements.

But that humanity is precisely what I will remember. I have seen President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a deeper decency — a decency that is privately engaging and publicly consequential.

Perhaps this “humanity” and “decency” is lost on those who more clearly remember his administration’s more glaring inhumane and indecent policies, as Andrew Sullivan rightly points out.

Michael Gerson manages to write a column about George W. Bush’s humane side without noting that this president subjected, by lawless fiat, countless individuals to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, tortured at least two dozen individuals to death, and launched a war where hundreds of thousands of innocents died because of his negligence and hubris. Yes, PEPFAR is an achievement. But set against the legacy of the first American president to authorize torture against mere suspects, to adopt the techniques of the Khmer Rouge and the Gestapo for the US, PEPFAR is sadly overwhelmed.

No president’s record - in its treatment of helpless prisoners under his total control - has ever been as indecent as this president’s. Gerson was an integral part of the administration that brought torture into the American system of government. He has yet to address this - and the challenge it presents for Christians in particular.

What I also find indecent is Bush’s legions of blindly loyal disciples continuing to whitewash the record of what this administration has done and what it has done to this nation’s fundamental principles of humanity and decency.

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Another brilliant illustration by Jessica Hagy…