Tag: Bush

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Opinion Viewpoint

No Conservative Party

The Republican Party is not now, never was, and never will be a conservative party. It is what it has always been: a representative of the rich and of big business.

It might have become a conservative party in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was nominated as the presidential candidate. The Rockefeller wing of the party, to which the Bush family has always been a part, conducted the most vicious character assassination campaign against Goldwater in modern political history. The liberal Rockefellerites preferred a crook from Texas to a conservative.

The Rockefeller wing never lost control of the party again, co-opting Nixon, Ford, and even Ronald Reagan, who was forced to take George Bush as his vice president. The Bush people, within two years, ran off nearly all of the original Reagan supporters.

There was a famous quote by James Baker, the first Bush’s hatchet man. He was quoted as saying: “Who else are the conservatives going to vote for?”

Well, Mr. Baker discovered that the conservatives had three choices in 1992. They could stay at home, they could vote for Ross Perot, or they could vote for Bill Clinton. I hope he thought of that while he watched Clinton’s inauguration.

The hard truth is that if you are a genuine political conservative, you don’t have a party. The Democrats are practically socialists; the Republicans are closer to corporate fascists. Neither one offers conservatives anything but rhetoric.

But let’s define our terms, because it is my belief that not many Americans today are really conservative. Political conservatism has nothing to do with such social issues as abortion or gay marriage. Those are moral and philosophical issues that properly belong to the state legislatures.

A true conservative recognizes that the Constitution is a binding contract that should be interpreted literally and in the context of the time at which it was written and ratified. A Constitution that means anything a judge says it means means nothing. Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party were the first to violate it in a blatant manner. One of Lincoln’s cronies referred to it as “a worthless piece of parchment.”

A true conservative is fiscally responsible. Laying debt and interest payments on posterity is neither conservative nor liberal. It is just obscenely irresponsible.

A true conservative believes in noninterference in the affairs of other countries. Regime change is a policy favored by fascists or communists, but it has nothing to do with American conservatism. Americans have the right to govern only one country — their own. Americans have an obligation to defend only one country — their own.

A true conservative believes in a free economy and that beyond protecting the public from force and fraud, the government should not interfere in private affairs.

There are a lot of other things that define a genuine conservative, but suffice it to say that the Republican Party, with its imperialistic foreign policy, its disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, its fiscal irresponsibility and its erosion of personal liberty, is not by any stretch of the imagination a conservative party.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea for people to sit down with a pencil and paper and list what they actually believe. Clarifying their own political philosophy might make them less susceptible to the demagoguery and political propaganda that characterize our present age.

When the Founding Fathers laid the burden of self-government on us, they didn’t do any favors for the ignorant and lazy-minded. Tom Jefferson observed that those who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for the Lew Rockwell Syndicate.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

There’s been so much in print about how Daddy

41’s people are back in the saddle, I was terrified when I saw a photo

of Dan Quayle among the pack. If they’ve called back Dan Quayle to lend intellectual heft, we’re all dead ducks. Fortunately, it was just a file picture of Quayle with the old team.

It does seem that we may be going back to the typical modus operandi of Dubya. Poppy Bush has helped Junior out of the Vietnam War, his failures in the oil business, and other efforts all of his “adult” life.

Unfortunately for us and for the world, the people from the first Bush administration who initially joined this administration were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Not exactly the most diplomatic, forward-looking, helpful people to be guiding Dubya.

During the first Gulf War, Bush 41 and his administration knew what it would be like if they tried to take Baghdad — and opted not to go in. Now, the more sober-headed people from that administration are moving in to try to clean up the mess Junior made in his Iraq excursion.

Meanwhile, let us bid farewell and adieu to Brother Donald Rumsfeld, who is so full of wisdom he does not seem to be able to apply it. As a parting gift, here are some of his classic quotes:

1. “If you develop rules, never have more than 10.”

2. “Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”

3. “Needless to say, the president is correct. Whatever it was he said.”

4. “I don’t do quagmires.”

5. “I don’t do diplomacy.”

6. “I don’t do foreign policy.”

7. “I don’t do predictions.”

8. “I don’t do numbers.”

9. “I don’t do book reviews.”

10. “Don’t divide the world into ‘them’ and ‘us.’ Avoid infatuation with or resentment of the press, the Congress, rivals or opponents. Accept them as facts. They have their jobs, and you have yours.”

11. “Don’t say, ‘The White House wants.’ Buildings can’t want.”

12. “If I know the answer, I’ll tell you the answer. And if I don’t, I’ll just respond cleverly.”

13. “I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it’s what I said.”

In fact, I’m rather going to miss Rumsfeld’s Zen-like nuggets of wisdom, the most famous of which is probably about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns:

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

According to Newsweek, Air Force secretary Jim Roche went to Rumsfeld early on and said, “Don, you do realize that Iraq could be another Vietnam.”

Replied Rummy: “Vietnam? You think you have to tell me about Vietnam? Of course it won’t be Vietnam. We are going to go in, overthrow Saddam, get out. That’s it.”

I don’t know what happened to that excellent plan, but I would like to know who knew it was unknowable.

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Film Features Film/TV

Death of a President

After an absorbing opening act, Gabriel Range’s documentary-style fantasy about the 2007 assassination of President George W. Bush succumbs to narrative torpor; in a telling, unintentional irony, the film’s gradual decomposition into symbolism and senselessness mirrors the problems all revolutionaries face when they seek and achieve violent regime change: Namely, what do you do once the bad guy is gone? Oddly, this strange provocation is most successful in its sympathetic treatment of G.W. Bush as both a public figure and a homespun mythological presence; once the president dies after giving an RFK-like final speech, the rest of the film doesn’t know whether to explore the political aftermath of the event or expose the suspected assassins. It ends up throwing up its hands in confusion.

For more rigorous and outrageous political speculation, seek out the DVD works of pseudo-documentarian Peter Watkins. Or better still, pick up Sinclair Lewis’ vitriolic 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which addresses the major flaws of Death of a President succinctly: “In America, which had so warmly praised itself for its ‘widespread popular free education,’ there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted — indeed knew about so few things to want at all.” This film doesn’t help matters.

Now playing, Palace Cinema

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News News Feature

Bonked on the Head

President Bush has been bonked on the head by so many facts that refute his rhetoric in recent days, he must feel like he’s been caught in a West Texas hailstorm. But don’t worry about him. He’s a hardheaded man. I haven’t seen a fact yet that can get past his hair.

Even as the president has been putting a dent in the aviation-fuel inventory by flying around to tell Americans that they are safer because of the war in Iraq, out comes a National Intelligence Estimate and a couple of generals who say, “No, you’re not.”

As a number of people pointed out, even before the Iraq invasion in 2003, sending the Army to Iraq was the biggest favor Bush could possibly have granted to old Osama bin Laden. Invading a Muslim country and killing and abusing its people has been a great recruiting tool. There are now more insurgents than there were two years ago. There are now more attacks than there were two years ago.

A much-annoyed president ordered parts of the NIE to be declassified (part of it had been leaked). Actually, the NIE should never be classified in the first place. The American people and Congress have a right to know about the work product of our $40 billion-a-year intelligence industry. It’s mostly bureaucratic heifer dust anyway.

The only legitimate reason to classify anything is to prevent an enemy from learning in advance of troop movements or to protect a valuable source. Neither applies to the NIE.

But the prez wanted it declassified to get to one of those if-then scenarios so well loved in the Washington skunk works. The NIE says that if the jihadists are defeated in Iraq, then they might become discouraged and lose popularity.

This, of course, is a pair of suppositions without any supporting evidence. If we have not defeated the jihadists in three years at a cost of a quarter of a trillion dollars, what evidence is there to support the belief that we can defeat them in the future? And if we did defeat them, what evidence is there to support the supposition that they would become discouraged?

The Palestinians have been struggling with Israel and losing for decades, and they haven’t given up. We fought the “insurgents” in Vietnam for 10 years, dropping more high explosives on them than we used in World War II, and they didn’t get discouraged and give up. As a matter of fact, we got discouraged and gave up.

Use your noodle. Who do you think is more likely to get discouraged and give up? The insurgents, who are at home and whose supply line stretches around the corner, or the U.S., which has 147,000 troops at the end of a 7,000-mile supply line? It costs us far more to buy milk and bottled water for our troops than it does to make improvised explosives, since the bunglers in the Pentagon left Iraq littered with thousands of artillery shells. There were not enough troops to police them all up — though, of course, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, insisted we had all the troops we needed.

Already a majority of Americans don’t believe the war is worth it, and as the dollars keep pouring out and the bodies keep coming back, that figure will surely grow. On the other hand, nobody gets to vote as to whether the insurgents should continue to fight.

As my fictional hero, Gus McCrae of Lonesome Dove, would say, Congress has always been too leaky a bucket to put much faith in. It was Congress that pulled the plug on our troops in Vietnam and on the South Vietnamese government. It will eventually do the same in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As much as the windbags in Washington aspire to be an empire, they just don’t have the staying power of the Roman legions. President Bush, however, will leave office convinced he never made a single mistake in eight years. I’ve known sociopaths who feel the same way.

Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate.

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Opinion Viewpoint

State of Denial

Not too long after Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Republicans insisted on what would become the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. It was meant to ensure that never again would a president serve more than two terms. Now is the time for yet another amendment. This one would ensure that no child of a president could become president. This would avert another George W. Bush.

The reasons for this amendment can be amply found in Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial. If ever a title was apt, this is the one. As if to prove that Woodward had it right, Bush reacted to the book’s revelations about Don Rumsfeld — intransigent, incompetent, and intellectually intolerant — by reaffirming his confidence in him. To Bush — and indeed, to the rest of us as well — Rumsfeld has come to personify the conduct of the Iraq war. His leaving, especially his firing, would be an admission of the obvious: failure.

The Cohen Amendment comes to mind because from time to time Woodward quotes someone on why Bush ran for president in the first place and what determines his executive style: his father. He wanted to best his father but also even the score for him. George W. Bush wanted, in effect, to win the second term that George H.W. Bush had lost (to Bill Clinton), and he wanted also to finish the job his father had started with Saddam Hussein. If there is better explanation for why Bush so fervently wanted war, I cannot come up with it.

This descent of mine into the fog of Freudian politics is, I know, just the sort of thing Washington eschews. Such musings lack position papers or paper trails and rely instead on elastic language sometimes known as psychobabble. Yet those of us who are both fathers and sons know the truth of these matters. There is no more complicated relationship on the face of the earth. It is fraught with competition, suffused both with an edgy rivalry and an immense love that does not quit even with the grave. If I say that George W. Bush was out to both vanquish and redeem his father, many a man will know what I mean.

But I don’t have to say it. Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s close friend and his former national security adviser, says it for me. This is what Woodward writes about Scowcroft: “In his younger years, Scowcroft thought, George W. couldn’t decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the game, and it was a disaster.”

It was not only Scowcroft, though, who thought, or feared, that Bush had approached the challenge of Saddam Hussein the wrong way. There are suggestions in the Woodward book that both of Bush’s parents felt that way. Woodward quotes a conversation Barbara Bush had with former Senator David Boren, an old family friend, in which she says that both she and her husband are “worried” about Iraq — with the former president “losing sleep over it.” Boren asks why the father did not talk to the son.

“He doesn’t think he should unless he’s asked,” Barbara Bush said.

I go on about this matter because in the Woodward book, as with everything else I’ve read about the 43rd president, it’s apparent that Bush had no reason to run for the office other than to satisfy some psychological compulsion — and had no accomplishment to his name that did not stem from primogeniture. Especially in foreign policy, he was an ignoramus who smugly thought that his instincts trumped experience and knowledge. What’s even more appalling is that over and over in Woodward’s book, Bush sticks to his losing hand, refusing to challenge his own assumptions or, it seems, his steadfast belief that his is a divine mission.

The conventional script in Washington for ending the Iraq war is for Bush to approach key Democrats and seek bipartisan cover for a methodical American withdrawal. Maybe that will happen or maybe it will be Republicans such as James Baker, Bush senior’s secretary of state, who will do the approaching. But given the nature of the problem, maybe it would be best if the father shed his reluctance and offered his son some sharp advice. After all, it is now clear that the finest service one president can provide another — not to mention his country — is to assert a parental role. The kid’s in way over his head.

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Opinion Viewpoint

GOP Troubles

The Democrats are determined to make the election of 2006 a referendum on Bush and the war in Iraq. And, as of now, that is how history will likely record it. But beneath the surface of the national election, a different plebiscite is being held within the conservative movement on the ideology George Bush imposed on Ronald Reagan’s party.

What are the elements of Bushite neoconservatism?

First, an interventionist foreign policy, using U.S. power to impose democracy and “end tyranny on this earth.” Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon are the laboratories and proving grounds.

Second, “big-government conservatism,” as seen in the deficits, the dearth of vetoes, soaring social spending in wartime, the bulking up of the Department of Education and “faith-based initiatives.”

Third, an immigration policy featuring amnesty and a “path to citizenship” for 12 million illegal aliens, pardons for all businesses that hired illegals, and outsourcing of immigration policy to corporate America to go abroad and hire workers for jobs here.

Fourth, a trade policy rooted in the belief that it does not matter where goods are produced or whether Americans produce them. What matters is unimpeded global commerce, where the consumer is king and gets all the goods he wants at the cheapest possible price.

On these four mega-questions, Republicans are as divided as they were in the days of Rockefeller and Goldwater. Wherever “conservatives” stand — whether Old Right or neocon, supply-sider or deficit hawk, “America first” or global democrat, big government or small government — the returns of Bush’s policies are largely in and the outcome is unlikely to change. And this is why Bush and the GOP are in trouble, and neoconservatism is in the dock.

The altarpiece of the Bush foreign policy is Iraq. American dead are at 2,600, the wounded at 18,000. Three hundred billion dollars has been plunged into the war. Yet, Iraq is a bloodier, more dangerous place now than it has been since the fall of Baghdad. IED attacks on U.S. troops are at record levels — three-and-a-half years after Baghdad fell.

The Bush democracy campaign has brought stunning electoral gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq. Our ally in Afghanistan Hamid Kharzai is today little more than mayor of Kabul, as the Taliban roam the southeast and coalition casualties reach the highest levels since liberation five years ago. North Korea and Iran remain defiant on their nuclear programs. Vladimir Putin is befriending every regime at odds with Bush, from Tehran to Damascus to Caracas.

Unless we grade foreign policy on the nobility of the intent, it is not credible to call Bush’s foreign policy a sucess. The Lebanon debacle, once U.S. complicity is exposed, is unlikely to win anyone a Nobel.

Bush’s trade policy has left us with annual deficits of $800 billion with the world and $200 billion with Beijing. Once the greatest creditor nation in history, we are now the greatest debtor. U.S. manufacturing has been hollowed out with thousands of plants closed and 3 million industrial jobs vanishing since Bush took office.

As for Bush immigration policy, the nation is in virtual rebellion. Six million aliens have been caught at the Mexican border since he took office. One in 12 had a criminal record. In April and May, millions of Hispanics marched through U.S. cities demanding amnesty and all rights of citizenship for aliens who are breaking the law by even being here. Bush and the Senate are in paralysis, appeasing the lawbreakers by offering amnesties and by opposing House demands that the president seal the border.

While the economy has been running well since 2003, the real wages of working Americans have not kept pace with the portfolios of the clients of Lawrence Kudlow. Industrial states, like Ohio, could be killing fields of the GOP in November.

To the neocon guru Irving Kristol, “The historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be … to convert the Republican Party and American conservatism in general into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”

With some of us, the tutoring never took, but the neocons surely did convert George W.

How’s your boy doing, Irving?

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Among the various awards to government officials,
let me offer one of my own: the Oveta Culp Hobby Award for a truly dumb statement. I have twice before cited the late Mrs. Hobby, the nation’s chief health official back in the Eisenhower administration, because she somehow managed to remain oblivious to the polio panic that struck each summer. When the government ran short of the new and downright miraculous Salk polio vaccine, the rich and fortunate Mrs. Hobby offered the following explanation: “No one could have foreseen the public demand for the vaccine.”

For sheer inanity, the remark is almost impossible to beat. Yet three times in the past couple of weeks I reached for the Hobby Award, thinking she had at least been matched. The first came when General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by Senator John McCain whether a year ago he anticipated that Iraq might be on the verge of civil war. “No, sir,” the general said.

Next McCain posed the same question to General John P. Abizaid, who is in charge of everything in Iraq. He knew a year ago that tensions were high, he said. But “that they would be this high, no.”

Finally, we have the remarks of Major General William B. Caldwell, spokesman for the American military in Iraq. He was not at the Senate hearing, but he caught its flavor and then some. When asked by The New York Times if the United States had moved too quickly to replace American troops with Iraqis, he said, “I don’t think we moved too quickly. I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”

Oveta, move over.

Can these high-ranking military officers possibly mean what they said? Even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the term “civil war” was being bruited about. This was because even a casual viewer of the Discovery Channel or some such thing knew that the nation of Iraq was an artificial creation of Britain — Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, et al. The casual viewer also knew that a minority of Sunnis had governed a majority of Shiites through the application of violence and a not inconsiderable amount of torture. Why this country would hold together once the locks were clipped is a question whose answer we are now seeing: It won’t.

The high-ranking officers cited above are neither stupid nor ignorant of Iraq’s history. I can only conclude, therefore, that, like countless others before them, they feel compelled to say things that fit the political ideology and delusions of their civilian bosses in the Bush administration. The official line there, of course, is that Iraq is not and will not and could not descend into civil war because, well, that would aid the evildoers.

Whatever the case, we now have to understand that uttering the word “Iraq” does to Bush administration officials what a touch of tequila does to Mel Gibson. I could spend the rest of this column quoting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others on what would happen when GI Joe got to Baghdad or why the war had to be fought in the first place. The collected quotes are funny in one context, sad and infuriating in another: the playing of taps, the folding of the flag, and the required lie about “a hero’s death.”

I dutifully read the news about Iraq. But I recognize most administration statements as lies or, if by accident the actual truth, a mere snapshot of a moment that will change over time. More troops one day, fewer the next. We have this town one day; we don’t the next. Iraqi troops are up to snuff; oops, no they’re not. This is the babble of chaos, the telltale rhetoric of defeat.

I share the concern of what would happen to Iraq if the United States pulled out precipitously. I share the concern over what will happen if the United States stays. I share the concern of those who say that no matter whether it stays or goes the outcome will be the same. I especially share the concern of those who say that the Bush administration does not have a plan to disengage and that rather than confront the immensity of its mistake — I pity Donald Rumsfeld if he should ever lose the gift of denial — it thinks that this or that adaptation to new conditions will somehow change the outcome. It will not. The end was set at the beginning. It is better that it come sooner rather than later.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group. Tim Sampson will return next week.