Book Review: 'Decision Points'

By Rich Trzupek
http://frontpagemag.com/
November 15, 2010

After a presidency that encompassed eight of the most tumultuous and politically savage years in recent memory, one could understand if George W. Bush was a more than a little disenchanted with the media, with politics, and with ideologues. And he surely is, to some extent, but that’s not the overwhelming impression that comes across after reading Decision Points, Bush’s account of some of the most important issues that have come to define his term in office. Rather, the message of the book is that the man from Midland retains a deep faith in his country and its people. To borrow a word more commonly associated with another president, George W. Bush remains as hopeful about America and its future as he was on the day he took office.

While Decision Points contains some autobiographical anecdotes, it’s not so much a memoir as a study in command. Bush takes us through the process that led him to formulate policy on nine big issues that marked his presidency: stem cell research, 9/11, preventing domestic terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, fighting AIDS in Africa, the surge and the financial crisis, among others. The narrative style is pure Bush and his editors at Crown Publishing are to be commended for not trying to make the president sound like someone he’s not. In his writing we find the folksy tone, the economy of words and an aversion to flowery language that defined his preferred oratorical style. It’s an easy, enjoyable, and very often a fascinating read. But if Bush uses plain language in Decision Points, there is nothing simple about his analysis. Rather, as the president walks the reader through each chain of events and the policy discussions that ensued, it’s clear that this man – so often derided as a simpleton by the Left – has a shrewd grasp of the subtleties of leadership.

Though defensive at times, Bush appears not so much interested in protecting his reputation as he is in giving readers an inside look at the competing political and patriotic agendas that all presidents are forced to consider while trying to lead the nation. Early on, he points to Harry Truman as a point of inspiration and guidance. “He did what he thought was right and he didn’t much care what the critics said,” Bush wrote. “When he left office in 1953, his approval ratings were in the twenties. Today he is viewed as one of America’s greatest presidents.”

The innate decency of the forty-third president of the United States shines through Decision Points. This is a man with immense respect for his nation, its citizens and, most of all, the men and women who serve it in uniform. In what is almost an aside, Bush reveals one of the ways he expressed his profound admiration and gratitude for America’s fallen warriors while in office. “I sent letters to the families of every service member who laid down his or her life in the war on terror,” he wrote. “By the end of my presidency, I had written to almost five thousand families.” Indeed, the very last words of the book are directed toward the men and women serving in the military. Wrapping up four pages of acknowledgments, Bush closes Decision Points with a paragraph thanking everyone in uniform, summing up thus:

Their achievements will rank alongside those of the greatest generations in history, and the highest honor of my life was to serve as their commander in chief.

Some of his ideological opponents come across better than expected in Bush’s recounting. Most surprisingly, Ted Kennedy is among this group. Bush describes a relationship in which he and the late Senator acknowledged their many differences, but agreed to work together on issues they could agree on, most notably No Child Left Behind and on crafting an immigration bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn’t fare as well. Bush is careful to avoid direct criticism of anyone, but an easy read between the lines lets you know that he found some people tiresome and Reid is clearly high on this list. He recounts, for example, how he worked with Kennedy and was within a couple of votes of getting an immigration bill passed. But, the Senate was due to adjourn for the Fourth of July break. Both Kennedy and Bush called Reid to ask him to extend the session for a couple of days so they could get the bill through. Reid wouldn’t budge. “Given the importance of the legislation, I thought it would be worthwhile to allow them a little extra time for the bill to pass,” Bush wrote. “Apparently Harry Reid did not.”

Ex-Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco doesn’t fare too well either. As the situation in New Orleans spiraled out of control following Hurricane Katrina, the president struggled with the decision to send troops to restore order and help the victims. On the one hand, he could order federal troops in unilaterally, so long as they were unarmed. Given the looting and violence that gripped the Crescent City, as well as his devotion to protect the lives to those serving in the military, he was hesitant to do so. But, he could legally send armed troops into New Orleans if the Governor of Louisiana requested them. Blanco seemed paralyzed by the crisis. The president related the following exchange that occurred in the Air Force One conference room on September 2, 2005, four days after Katrina hit:

I told her it was clear that state and local response forces had been overwhelmed. “Governor,” I pressed, “you need to authorize the federal government to take charge of the response.”

She told me that she needed twenty four hours to think it over.

“We don’t have twenty-four hours,” I snapped. “We’ve waited too long already.”

The governor refused to answer.

Bush doesn’t waste much time or effort talking about the vicious, maniacal attacks that ultra-leftist billionaire George Soros financed as part of his obsession to remove the president from power. But one anecdote is particularly revealing about the way that Soros thinks and functions. The president and U2 lead singer Bono struck up an unlikely friendship, owing to Bush’s efforts to battle AIDS in Africa. Soros, who had provided funding to some of Bono’s causes, was not pleased. Bush related the financer’s rebuke to the singer: “You’ve sold out for a plate of lentils,” Soros told Bono.

Of course, the one issue that will define this president when the long view of history looks back at his administration is Bush’s response to Islamic terror. Bush carefully describes the multi-faceted issues that he had to deal with while crafting America’s strategy and how he dealt with the great decisions: balancing civil liberties versus rooting out domestic terror cells; how to deal with enemy combatants; rooting out the Taliban in Afghanistan; and ensuring that Saddam Hussein was neutralized. In some cases, politics came into play, but not often. Decision Points makes it clear that Bush would give political realities considerable weight when it came to domestic issues, but he was loath to compromise when it came to fulfilling his oath to protect and defend America. He would err on the side of caution when it came to protecting the nation and its citizens and if that provided ammunition to opponents in Congress and the media, he could care less. He would rather be criticized for doing too much than for his fellow Americans to suffer because he did too little.

This attitude, more than any other, inflamed Bush’s enemies on the Left. Most politicians share a particular characteristic with young children: they yearn to be noticed. Yet, when it came to the war on terror, George W. Bush rarely bothered to take his opponents’ concerns into account. He duly noted them, explained why they were wrong and moved steadily on. His focus was on protecting the nation, protecting our troops and minimizing the threat of terrorism – period. In his way, Bush was as single-minded about pursuing a goal as any president in history. That focus allowed his opponents to claim that Bush was either dangerously obsessed, or – more often – too dim to grasp the important issues they were raising.

Former President George W. Bush signs a copy of his book 'Decision Points' last Tuesday morning at a bookstore near his Dallas home. (LM Otero/AP)

There are villains and heroes aplenty in the tale. Yasser Arafat’s naked duplicity clearly disgusted Bush, while Tony Blair’s loyalty inspired him. He bemoaned the weakness of will of the many American politicians who wanted to abandon a fight that the president had warned would be long and hard at the outset, but the strength of others, like Senator Joe Lieberman, shines through. From the confusion of the attacks on 9/11, to taking out the Taliban in Afghanistan, through the decision to wage war in Iraq, Bush’s recounting of his role in the war on terror is the most fascinating part of Decision Points. One particular decision point — implementing what is known as “the surge” deserves special attention.

From the beginning of the war in Iraq, Bush and his advisors worried about having too many Americans involved in the conflict. They were concerned that an overwhelming American force would appear like an army of occupation to Iraqis and the Muslim world, rather than an army of liberation. Thus, the initial invasion force was less than half of that which invaded Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Bush’s commander in Iraq, General George Casey, along with many advisors, stuck to the plan. They believed that a minimal American presence was essential if Iraqis were to establish self-governance. For a while, that strategy worked. But the situation began to deteriorate, and when the Golden Mosque of Samarra was bombed in February 2006, what had been a dangerous situation quickly dissolved into chaos. Faced with the prospect of complete failure, the president had to make what was probably the toughest decision point of his life:

General Casey – like General Abizaid and Don Rumsfeld – was convinced that our troop presence created a sense of occupation, which inflamed violence and fueled the insurgency. For two and a half years, I had supported the strategy of withdrawing our forces as the Iraqis stepped forward. But in the months after the Samarra bombing, I had started to question whether our approach matched the reality on the ground. The sectarian violence had not erupted because our footprint was too big. It had happened because al-Qaeda had provoked it. And with the Iraqis struggling to stand up, it didn’t seem possible for us to stand down.

Bush ultimately promoted the Army’s premier counterinsurgency expert, General David Petraeus to take charge in Iraq. He gave him more troops, not less, ignoring both conventional wisdom and political pressure. The president’s opponents, including the current occupant of the White House, howled that Bush was pursuing a dangerous, disastrous policy. The president’s opponents were wrong. The surge in troops and the leadership of General Petraeus culminated in a stunning victory, one that members of all parties now acknowledge. The free people of Iraq, if no one else, recognize the debt of gratitude that they owe to America and its stalwart men and women in uniform.

Decision Points is full of such stories. Each gives us a desperately needed glimpse of the world of governance that extends beyond politics and punditry. It’s a book that should be required reading for everyone, regardless of political persuasion. For anyone who doesn’t understand how decisions are made shouldn’t criticize the decisions that are made. In George W. Bush, we had a leader who may not have always made the right decision, but there should be no doubt that he made each decision for the right reasons.


URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/11/15/unraveling-decision-points/

Tea Partiers a Delayed Bush Backlash

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.townhall.com/
April 21, 2010

I attended the Cincinnati Tax Day Tea Party rally as a speaker. But it was more interesting to be an observer.

First, here's what I didn't see. I didn't see a single racist or bigoted sign or hear a single such comment. Nor did I see any evidence of "homegrown fascism." Though in fairness, such things are often in the eye of the beholder, now that dissent has gone from being the highest form of patriotism under George W. Bush to the most common form of racism under Barack Obama.

But I did see something a lot of people, on both the left and the right, seemed to have missed: a delayed Bush backlash.

One of the more widespread anti-tea party arguments goes like this: Republicans didn't protest very much when Bush ran up deficits and expanded government, so when Obama does the same thing (albeit on a far grander scale), Republican complaints can't be sincere.

This lazy sophistry opens the door to liberals' preferred argument: racism. "No student of American history," writes Paul Butler in the New York Times, "would be surprised to learn that when the United States elects its first non-white president, a strong anti-government movement rises up."

Butler, a law professor and author of the no-doubt-seminal "Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice," speaks for many in the media when he insinuates that nearly unprecedented stimulus spending combined with government takeovers of the health care, banking and automotive industries are dwarfed in importance by Obama's skin color.

I speak for many who have actually spoken to tea partiers when I say that is slanderous hogwash.

But how, then, to explain the relative right-wing quiescence on Bush's watch and fiscal Puritanism on Obama's?

No doubt partisanship plays a role. But partisanship only explains so much given that the tea partiers are clearly sincere about limited government and often quite fond of Republican-bashing. So here's an alternative explanation: Conservatives don't want to be fooled again.

Recall that Bush came into office promising to be a "different kind of conservative," and one of his first legislative victories was the No Child Left Behind Act, sponsored by Teddy Kennedy.

Throughout his presidency, Bush's "compassionate conservatism" surrendered -- either rhetorically or substantively -- to the assumptions of welfare state liberalism, i.e. that your decency was best measured by your commitment to large, inefficient government programs. "When somebody hurts," Bush insisted, "government has got to move."

Many conservatives disliked this whole mind-set and the policies behind it, from comprehensive immigration reform to Medicare Part D.

Many conservatives muted their objections, in part because they actually liked the man personally or because they approved of his stances on tax cuts, judges, abortion and, most important, the war on terror (we can see a similar dynamic with so many antiwar liberals who still support Obama).

Conservatives didn't necessarily bite their tongues (remember the Harriet Miers and immigration fiascoes), but they did prioritize supporting Bush -- often in the face of far nastier attacks than Obama has received -- over ideological purity. Besides, where were conservatives supposed to go? Into the arms of John Kerry?

The 2008 GOP primaries compounded conservative frustration. Because there was no stand-in for Bush in the contest, there was no obvious outlet for anger at Bush's years of pre-surge Iraq bungling or his decision to outsource domestic spending to Republican congressional ward-heelers. Then, as a lame duck, Bush laid down the predicates for much of Obama's first 100 days, supporting both a stimulus and Wall Street bailouts. As one participant of the D.C. Tea Party rally told the Washington Examiner's Byron York, "George Bush opened the door for Barack Obama and the Democrats to walk in."

According to last week's NYT/CBS poll of tea party supporters, 57 percent have a favorable view of Bush, but that hardly captures the nuance of tea party feelings. For instance, when Bush's face appeared on the Jumbotron in the arena, the Cincinnati audience applauded. When speakers criticized Bush and the GOP for "losing their way," the audience applauded even louder.

Going by what I saw in Cincinnati, second to a profound desire to rein in government, the chief attitude driving the 39 percent of tea partiers who describe themselves as "very conservative" isn't partisanship, racism or seizing the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. It's "we won't be fooled again." In the near term, that spells trouble for Obama and Democrats. In the long term, that lays down a serious gauntlet for Republicans.

Credit Where Credit Isn’t Due

Who gets to claim responsibility for success in Iraq? Joe Biden?

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 5, 2010 12:00 A.M.

‘Victory has a hundred fathers,” John F. Kennedy said, “and defeat is an orphan.”

By that standard, George W. Bush has won the Iraq war.

Last month, Vice President Joe Biden proclaimed on CNN’s Larry King Live that the peaceful transition to democracy and the (partial) withdrawal of U.S. forces “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

Initially, I ignored Biden’s comment because, well, he’s Joe Biden. As critical as I may be of the Obama administration, holding it accountable for Biden’s mouth seems grotesquely unfair.

But then White House spokesman Robert Gibbs defended the vice president, suggesting that it was Obama who put Iraq “back together” and worked out bringing American troops home. More on that in a moment.

Then, just this week, Newsweek, which spent years ridiculing Bush, came out with a cover story titled “Victory at Last: The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq,” in which the authors grudgingly and tentatively credit Bush with creating a democratic Iraq.

No word yet on whether Michael Moore will publicly cut off some fingers, like a failed Yakuza henchman, to atone for his misdeeds.

The Newsweek story might indeed be premature; recent upticks in Iraq violence demonstrate that nobody’s out of the woods yet. From what I can tell, there may be a rough summer ahead if a new government can’t be formed quickly. There almost certainly will be more bombings during this weekend’s elections and beyond.

Still, when the Obama administration starts taking credit for success in Iraq, you know things have changed for the better. Now, of course, it is a grotesque distortion of logic and even political decency for the White House to be taking credit for victory in Iraq.

Obama wouldn’t be president today if he hadn’t opposed the war. His opposition is what most distinguished him from Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Obama also opposed Bush’s surge, which turned Iraq around. He and Biden both claimed that it would actually make things worse. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence,” then-senator Obama declared in January 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

When Gibbs went to bat for Biden, he said that Obama’s achievement was “putting what was broken back together and getting our troops home, which we intend to do.” When it was pointed out that the proposed U.S. withdrawal had been set in the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the Bush administration, Gibbs claimed it was the “political pressure” of candidate Obama that made such an agreement possible.

On the merits, this is pretty pathetic stuff. The same administration that blames all of its mistakes on problems it inherited now wants to take credit for accomplishments it inherited.

Still, it's good news. First and foremost, it's a sign that the war in Iraq, while costly and deservedly controversial, was not for nothing. Putting Iraq on a path to democracy and decency is a noble accomplishment for which Americans, of all parties, should be proud. Even if you think the war wasn't worth it or that it was unjustified, only the truly blinkered or black-hearted can be vexed by the fact that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone and the country is on the path to better days.

Second, it shows that America's victories aren't Republican or Democratic victories, but American victories. The same goes for its losses. At times it seemed that at least some opponents of the Iraq war wanted America to lose because they thought that was synonymous with Bush losing. It doesn't work that way.

Indeed, that's what's so interesting about the strange turn in the zeitgeist. Many of the war's most ardent opponents claimed that Americans didn't like the war for the same reasons the hard left didn't. But all that talk about "imperialism," "neoconservatism," "Cheney-Halliburton blood for oil" and the rest was not at the core of the war's unpopularity. What most Americans didn't like was that we were losing militarily and losing the precious lives of our troops. Unlike the hard left (and certain quarters of the isolationist right), most Americans don't care that the U.S. has troops stationed all around the world. They don't think we're an evil empire because of our troops in South Korea or Germany.

What most Americans care about is winning, or, more accurately, winning in a good cause. Public attitudes are still raw when it comes to the war, and for good reason. But a generation from now, if Iraq is a stable, prosperous democracy, Americans will in all likelihood think the war was worth it, and that George W. Bush was right.

The Get-Cheney Squad

By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
August 27, 2009

"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres.

Yet, it seems now indisputable that those CIA interrogators, with their rough methods, got vital intelligence that saved American lives, as Dick Cheney has consistently contended.

According to The Washington Times, which reviewed the newly declassified CIA documents, those interrogators "produced life-saving intelligence that disrupted numerous terror plots."

They elicited the names of al-Qaida agents who planned anthrax attacks on Westerners and a massive bombing of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. base in East Africa. They got the names of 70 recruits al-Qaida deemed "suitable for Western attacks" and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.

Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from KSM and associates.

Other operations aborted include al-Qaida "plots to fly airliners into buildings on the West Coast, setting off bombs in U.S. cities and planning to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks and the Brooklyn Bridge."

What were the "inhumane" techniques CIA interrogators used to uncover these plans for the mass murder of Americans?

"Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms, while they were bound behind his back with a belt," reports The Washington Post. "Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. Another squeezed a detainee's neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out."

The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill KSM's children and rape his mother. Power drills were brandished in interrogation rooms.

Were any children killed? No. Was anyone's mother raped? No. Was the power drill used? No.

Was anyone executed in front of a witness to make him talk? No. It was faked, as Sean Connery faked it in "The Untouchables" to get an underling to blab to Eliot Ness, aka Kevin Costner, about how he could take down Al Capone's mob.

As for threatening to kill the children of our enemies, we did not do that in "The Good War." Instead, what we did was kill them in the thousands every night in air raids over Germany and Japan.

In the Tokyo firestorm of February 1945, the Dresden raid in March, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, we killed grandparents, mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, daughters and sons of the enemy in the scores of thousands on each of those days.

Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending, to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?

Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?

In 2004, career lawyers at Justice looked over the same reports and concluded that prosecutions would not serve the national interest. Obama has himself said he wants to move on.

Now, he and Holder may not like what was done back then, but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?

In its lead editorial Tuesday, "Following the Torture Trail," The Washington Post declaims, "The real culprits in this sordid story are the higher-ups, starting with former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard B. Cheney who led America down the degraded path of state-sponsored torture."

But why is Obama yielding to the clamor of a left that will not be satiated until Cheney and Bush are indicted as Class A war criminals? Is that in the national interest? Is it in Obama's interest to tear his country apart to expose and punish these CIA agents?

In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy and the boys at Justice set up a "Get Hoffa Squad" to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It was a vendetta that succeeded.

This vendetta will not. For, on the issue of national security, as Barack will painfully discover, he is not more trusted than Dick Cheney or the rough men at the CIA who did the harsh interrogations of terrorists, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

For the Left, war without Bush is not war at all

By Byron York
San Fransisco Examiner Columnist
http://www.sfexaminer.com/
August 18, 2009


Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party's most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush's Texas ranch.

That was then. Now, even though the United States still has roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq, and is quickly escalating the war in Afghanistan -- 68,000 troops there by the end of this year, and possibly more in 2010 -- anti-war voices on the Left have fallen silent.

No group was more angrily opposed to the war in Iraq than the netroots activists clustered around the left-wing Web site DailyKos. It's an influential site, one of the biggest on the Web, and in the Bush years many of its devotees took an active role in raising money and campaigning for anti-war candidates.

In 2006, DailyKos held its first annual convention, called YearlyKos, in Las Vegas. Amid the slightly discordant surroundings of the Riviera Hotel casino, the webby activists spent hours discussing and planning strategies not only to defeat Republicans but also to pressure Democrats to oppose the war more forcefully. The gathering attracted lots of mainstream press attention; Internet activism was the hot new thing.

Fast forward to last weekend, when YearlyKos, renamed Netroots Nation, held its convention in Pittsburgh. The meeting didn't draw much coverage, but the views of those who attended are still, as they were in 2006, a pretty good snapshot of the left wing of the Democratic party.

The news that emerged is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually fallen off the liberal radar screen. Kossacks (as fans of DailyKos like to call themselves) who were consumed by the Iraq war when George W. Bush was president are now, with Barack Obama in the White House, not so consumed, either with Iraq or with Obama's escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, they barely seem to care.

As part of a straw poll done at the convention, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg presented participants with a list of policy priorities like health care and the environment. He asked people to list the two priorities they believed "progressive activists should be focusing their attention and efforts on the most." The winner, by far, was "passing comprehensive health care reform." In second place was enacting "green energy policies that address environmental concerns."

And what about "working to end our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan"? It was way down the list, in eighth place.

Perhaps more tellingly, Greenberg asked activists to name the issue that "you, personally, spend the most time advancing currently." The winner, again, was health care reform. Next came "working to elect progressive candidates in the 2010 elections." Then came a bunch of other issues. At the very bottom -- last place, named by just one percent of participants -- came working to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's an extraordinary change in the mindset of the left. I attended the first YearlyKos convention, and have kept up with later ones, and it's safe to say that for many self-styled "progressives," the war in Iraq was the animating cause of their activism. They hated the war, and they hated George W. Bush for starting it. Or maybe they hated the war because George W. Bush started it. Either way, it was war, war, war.

Now, not so much.

Cindy Sheehan is learning that. She's still protesting the war, and on Monday she announced plans to demonstrate at Martha's Vineyard, where President Obama will be vacationing.

"We as a movement need to continue calling for an immediate end to the occupations [in Iraq and Afghanistan] even when there is a Democrat in the Oval Office," Sheehan said in a statement. "There is still no Noble Cause no matter how we examine the policies."

Give her credit for consistency, if nothing else. But her days are over. The people who most fervently supported her have moved on.

Not too long ago, some observers worried that Barack Obama would come under increasing pressure from the Left to leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, it seems those worries were unfounded. For many liberal activists, opposing the war was really about opposing George W. Bush. When Bush disappeared, so did their anti-war passion.

Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on www.ExaminerPolitics.com

43, For a Final Time

He takes his leave neither angry nor forlorn but rather with the serenity of someone sustained by a providential sense of history.

George F. Will
NEWSWEEK
http://www.newsweek.com/
From the magazine issue dated Jan 26, 2009

As the nation arrives, for the first time since 1825, at the end of consecutive eight-year presidencies, a summing up of the second of them must begin with this fact: Not since Abraham Lincoln's has an administration been so defined by a single subject as George W. Bush's has been by the Iraq War, which the country now thinks was improvidently begun and incompetently conducted. Historical judgments are, however, subject to history's contingencies, and if, a decade hence, Iraq has a nonsectarian regime controlled by a multiparty, recognizably democratic process, and if this exerts an improving tug on the region, Americans might then consider the war at least partially redeemed.

U.S. President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush wave as they return from Camp David to the White House in Washington, DC, January 18, 2009.
REUTERS/Joshua Roberts (UNITED STATES)

If history's judgment is that the war was positively related to the fact that there was no attack on America after 9/11, then history's judgment of the commander in chief will be much less severe than today's unhinged critics of him can imagine. Furthermore, some, and perhaps many, Americans probably are alive today because persons conspiring to commit mass murder were thwarted by the president's ferocious focus after 9/11.

He believes that America has "a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom." But "standing for" does not entail "exporting." To stroll in Arlington cemetery among headstones recording deaths during the appallingly named "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is infuriating: No American should have died for freedom in Iraq, and none did. All who sacrificed there did so for the security of America's freedom. The "nation building" there has been a learning experience, teaching Americans to recoil from suggested repetitions.

The administration's failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina were real but secondary to, and less shocking than, the manifold derelictions of duties by the governments of Louisiana and New Orleans. A failed nomination to the Supreme Court, that of Harriet Miers, was, however, indicative of the obduracy, arrogance and frivolity that at times characterized this administration. On the other hand, among Bush's excellent legacies, gifts that might keep on giving for decades, are two justices—John Roberts and Sam Alito.

Within the lifetimes of most Americans now living, today's media-manufactured alarm about man-made global warming might be an embarrassing memory. The nation will then be better off because Bush—during whose administration the embarrassing planet warmed not at all—refused to be stampeded toward costly "solutions" to a supposed crisis that might be chimerical, and that, if real, could be adapted for considerably less cost than will be sunk in efforts at prevention.

Just as Bill Clinton's presidency was costly for the Democratic Party, which had fewer senators, representatives, governors and state legislators when he left the White House than when he entered it, Bush's presidency has taken a terrific toll on the Republican Party's sense of itself. Consider:

By grafting a prescription-drug entitlement on to Medicare, just as the demographic deluge of the baby boomers' retirements was beginning, the president expanded the welfare state more than any president since Lyndon Johnson created Medicare in 1965. By signing every grotesque spending measure that arrived on his desk with the support of a majority of congressional Republicans—e.g., the 2002 farm bill that increased corporate welfare for agriculture at a time of record farm profits —the president committed his party to a situational ethic of governance that amounts to no ethic at all. By signing the McCain-Feingold speech-rationing (a.k.a. "campaign reform") legislation, the president violated his oath to defend the Constitution. By federalizing the family tragedy of Terri Schiavo, the president and some congressional allies made risible their stock of rhetoric in praise of limited government. By enacting the No Child Left Behind law, which is the thin end of a potentially enormous wedge, the administration licensed potentially unlimited federal supervision of the quintessentially local responsibility of education in grades K through 12, thereby further weakening federalism. And by presiding, in its last four months, over more and more flamboyant government intervention in the economy than at any time in 75 years, the administration completed the GOP's intellectual disarmament.

Actually, however, the contraction and self-marginalization of the Republican Party began before Bush entered office. In 2000, he became the first Republican to win the presidency while losing the North. In 2004, when he won re-election by winning Ohio, that was the only large state he carried outside the South. That year Bush became the first president since his father in 1988 to win more than 50 percent of the vote. This was a costly achievement, attained by embracing a sterile template of politics: Get your base riled up—it does not much matter about what—and hope that your base is a bit larger and angrier than the other party's, and that swing voters are a small slice of the turnout.

The president does not depart an angry man. He takes his leave with the serenity of someone sustained by a providential sense of history, as well as by wide reading of presidential histories, which contain many accounts of miseries. He leaves in eager anticipation of resuming life where he has been happiest, deep in the heart of Texas.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/180032

© 2009

Exit Bush, Shoes Flying

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Friday, January 16, 2009; A19

Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman's rehabilitation took decades. Bush's will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama.

Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds -- the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition. It's not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It's the continuity of policy.

U.S. President George W. Bush speaks publically for a final time as president from the East Room of the White House January 15, 2009 in Washington, DC. President-elect Barack Obama will be sworn in on January 20.(Getty Images)

It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned.

It is the great care Obama is taking in not preemptively abandoning the anti-terror infrastructure that the Bush administration leaves behind. While still a candidate, Obama voted for the expanded presidential wiretapping (FISA) powers that Bush had fervently pursued. And while Obama opposes waterboarding (already banned, by the way, by Bush's CIA in 2006), he declined George Stephanopoulos's invitation (on ABC's "This Week") to outlaw all interrogation not permitted by the Army Field Manual. Explained Obama: "Dick Cheney's advice was good, which is let's make sure we know everything that's being done," i.e., before throwing out methods simply because Obama campaigned against them.

Obama still disagrees with Cheney's view of the acceptability of some of these techniques. But citing as sage the advice offered by "the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history" (according to Joe Biden) -- advice paraphrased by Obama as "we shouldn't be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric" -- is a startlingly early sign of a newly respectful consideration of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

Not from any change of heart. But from simple reality. The beauty of democratic rotations of power is that when the opposition takes office, cheap criticism and calumny will no longer do. The Democrats now own Iraq. They own the war on al-Qaeda. And they own the panoply of anti-terror measures with which the Bush administration kept us safe these past seven years.

Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls "campaign rhetoric" and the policy choices he must make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek -- Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney -- has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek's neck-snapping cover declares, "Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney's Vision of Power."

Obama will be loath to throw away the tools that have kept the homeland safe. Just as he will be loath to jeopardize the remarkable turnaround in American fortunes in Iraq.

Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success.

In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong -- the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign -- the signing of a strategic partnership between the United States and Iraq -- and ends up dodging two size 10 shoes for his pains.

Absorbing that insult was Bush's final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands -- while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.

Which I suspect is why Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor -- and his country -- well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush's policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Who Was Behind the Jihad by the Shoe – and Why?

By Dr. Walid Phares
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/
December 20, 2008

As I observed the immediate aftermath of the shoe throwing incident in Baghdad, I noted that the most striking effect occurred among the Western public, and particularly within the United States. Commentators and regular citizens were asking themselves again, seven years later, “why do they hate us?” missing one more time the fact that this particular violent expression, far from being a unique emotional reaction by one individual, is part of a war of ideas; it is a continuous organized confrontation over the future of the region. In short, this was another form of Jihadism, one I am coining now as a Jihad by the Shoe (Jihad bil Hizaa). Here is why.

Western Awe of So-Called Arab Reaction

The main question on anchors’ minds and lips reflected the shock and awe felt by many Americans. It wasn’t really about the Iraqi journalist … targeting President Bush with his two leather “missiles”… for in liberal democracies, the scene of flying eggs, pies or liquid in the direction of politicians, legislators, Prime Ministers or Presidents is part of the political culture. Even obscene gestures and words are frequently uttered against leaders; this behavior comes with the package of democratic freedoms. It ends up usually with a sensational picture on the front page, as a joke on TV’s late night shows, and/or it can come with some minor legal consequences.

But the shoe bombing of President Bush stunned Western commentators for another reason: the seemingly vast outpouring of support the thrower received in the region. In the absence of sound expert analysis as to the meaning of the colorful reporting on Arab channels, and as many Western media went overboard in their guilt-ridden commentaries, the public was left alone to figure this out. Obviously their conclusion was that “whatever we do for them, they will continue to hate us.”

That’s exactly the gist of almost every question I was asked by the media: “After all we’ve done for them, freed them from Saddam, lost three thousand American men and women and spent billions of dollars, they made a hero of a shoe thrower against our President.” While the unease in America and in many Western countries is legitimate, the cause of their frustration, not the shoe thrower, should be blamed: as before, the public was very poorly served by its media and academia. The public simply wasn’t told – with accuracy - what actually unfolded in that incident, which was another battle in the ongoing War of Ideas, aimed at defeating the will of the free world. Here is how:

The Shoe Thrower

According to Arab commentators, Iraqi journalist Muntazar al Zaidi, who launched his two shoes against U.S. President George Bush while calling him “dog”, is a controversial militant. Dr. Abdel Khaliq Hussein, writing in Elaph accused al Zaidi of being a “friend of the terrorists.” Furthermore, along with other analysts, Hussein said the “shoe thrower” used to know about the “terrorist attacks before they took place and managed to be at the location beforehand.” These are serious accusations against a person who was made into an icon of “Arab pride” by the Jihadi media machine. Furthermore, Hussein wrote that al Zaidi fabricated his abduction story last year to get “maximum publicity.” One can see a pattern here. Maybe President Bush’s instincts were right.

In the daily al Shaq al Awsat, another observer wrote that al Zaidi is a Sadrist. Others disagree and describe him as radical opportunist. Nidal Neaissi, also writing in Elaph, reminded his readers of an historical precedent in Bedouin history: a well known greedy man, Abi Qassem al Tamburi was always trying to get rid of his shoe by throwing it against well known people, attracting the support (and more) of their enemies. Too many comments about the so-called “shoe hero” have appeared in the Arab media - unread in the West - leaving us with one conclusion. The man had a plan for his shoe: a major show. And it worked.

The Force behind the Shoe Thrower

It gets better when you investigate the organization paying his salary and expenses. Al Baghdadiya TV, based in Cairo, is owned by another controversial figure in the murky world of Middle Eastern media: Abdel Hussein Shaaban, an Iraqi Shia from Najaf and ex-Communist. According to Iraqi opposition sources based in London, Shaaban was an operative for Saddam, tasked with discrediting the Baathist leader’s critics around the world. Obviously it comes with payroll, according to the same sources.

But more recent accusations leveled by media experts in the region claim that al Baghdadiya TV, like dozens of other recipients, are getting significant funding from the Iranian regime. Military expert W. Thomas Smith, Jr., writing in World Defense Review has described the huge propaganda operation unleashed by Tehran directly, and via its network in Beirut, to “influence” Arab and Western media and to direct them against the regime’s foes.

Blasting George Bush, and more importantly his project of “spreading Democracy”, is high on Iran’s list but also on many other regimes’ agendas. An article by Ali Al Gharash titled “Shoes Terrify Regimes Now” shows that a consensus exists within the region’s establishment to demolish the image of the man who dared (despite the failure of U.S. bureaucracy) to “do it,” that is to tear down their wall of radical ideologies. The shoe thrower was clearly on a mission to do just that by striking at the “head” of the enemy with his pair of shoes.

The Making of a Jihadi Hero

Minutes after the incident took place and was captured by the media feed and aired worldwide, a snowball flurry of releases, special shows with commentators - gathered too fast for the circumstance - were on the airwaves. Interestingly al Baghdadiya TV issued – faster than the speed of light - a long press release calling for struggle. Minutes after, a vast magma of satellite channel sympathizers of Jihadism, and of sites virulently anti-democracy, exploded with incitement and calls for mobilization - and some were even as provocative as characterizing the ballistic exercise by al Zaidi as an “act of Jihad.”


A protester displays a shoe and a picture of U.S. President George W. Bush during a protest in Amman December 20, 2008. Protesters on Saturday showed their support for detained Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who hurled his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush during a recent news conference in Iraq.
REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed (JORDAN)

Within six hours, the airwaves in the region were invaded by the “shoe Jihad.” Within 12 hours, friendly voices beaming from Western networks joined the orchestra in aggrandizing the matter. “A shoe in the Arab culture is the worst epithet one can use, it expresses so deep an anger,” blasted one of the oldest international media out of Europe. More seasoning was added on this side of the Atlantic. “Analysts” for mainstream networks - most of whom can’t speak the language - began lecturing the stunned public on the “lessons to be learned and on the pain felt in those lands at the sight of President Bush.” And the framing continued on. By the second day, both the Arab satellite cohorts and the “specialists” on “how to understand the region” were breaking to the world the grandiose news: a new hero was born in the Muslim world, the shoe thrower. Give it a few weeks and Hollywood will buy the story and make a movie out of it. Give it a year and it will be taught as a course by our academic cinema.

The West is Dragged to Confusion

Within Western democracies, informational confusion reigns: this is “Bushophobia” claim the most sophisticated. It is impossible, after all the Coalition has done to free Iraqis from Saddam, that demonstrators are chanting for the shoe thrower. Others, less confident in the ability of the region’s peoples to accept democracy and to be thankful to the liberators, began a psychological withdrawal: let them live under dictatorships for they don’t deserve better, said many talk show hosts.

When a Western response like this happens, connoisseurs of Jihadi tactics know that the “shoe Jihad” worked impeccably. It spread doubts in the heads of Westerners, particularly among Americans, so that few will support a U.S. President in the future if he asks for sacrifices to “bring change” to the region. The combined propaganda machine of the Baathists, Salafists, Khomeinists and other authoritarians scored a major coup in a job lasting only 48 hours: they forced a confused West to believe that the region is utterly opposed to liberal democracy. Consequently, the next White House and other chanceries across the Atlantic need to learn from the shoe attack: do not intervene in Darfur; do not pressure the Iranian regime; do not help Lebanon against Hezbollah and let go of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pro-Democracy Voices Lash Out

But the critics of the “Shoe Jihad”were as fast as the petro-dollar machine in reacting. Indeed, and unlike what most Westerners were swift to conclude, pro-democracy voices were loud and clear: from Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco and across the Arab world, and particularly from Iraq, journalists, bloggers, talk show hosts, teachers and artists blasted the Jihadi comedy and rejected the “unholy shoeing.” For each email on al Jazeera supportive of the insult, another email landed on liberal web sites and editorial rooms. How the incident was reported in the Middle East depended on who stood behind which medium. Sadly, if the funders were petro-regimes, the “Shoe Jihad” won. The other side’s volume was too low to be broadcast throughout the world. International media, incorporating the West’s global apology syndrome, obviously showcased the “partisans of the shoe” rather than those who were embarrassed by it.

A War of Ideas

The West was left to see only what it was allowed to watch: a repeat of previous cycles in the War of Ideas. Viewers in New York and Paris can see the angry protesters of the Danish Cartoons and Guantanamo and the insulting of a U.S. President; but they cannot see the men and women who wish to shoe bomb their own dictators and oppressors. Sometimes the public has a mere glimpse of the other side: when Saddam’s statue was toppled and beaten with shoes for few hours, and when a million people demanded the Assad regime to take their boots off of Lebanon’s soil.

Meanwhile, the battle for minds and hearts rages relentlessly - a confrontation so far won by those who wage Jihad by all means, as they say. This time, it was by the shoe.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of "The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad."

If the Shoe Fits, Throw It

by Robert Spencer
http://www.humanevents.com/
12/18/2008

The Islamic world’s latest hero is Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the reporter for Cairo’s Al-Baghdadia TV channel who threw his shoes at President Bush at a press conference in Iraq on Sunday. Hasan Muhammad Makhafa, a wealthy Saudi, went on Dubai’s Al-Arabiya TV to call al-Zeidi’s shoes “a symbol of freedom not just footwear. They represent a victory for those who have disgraced the Arabs by occupying their lands and killing innocent people.”

Makhafa was so enthusiastic about this grand gesture of freedom that he offered to plunk down a cool $10 million for the heroic dress shoes. (Makhafa, by the way, is an elementary school teacher. How many elementary school teachers in America have ten million dollars to spend on a pair of shoes? Your gas money at work, folks!)

The less well heeled were just as jazzed by al-Zeidi’s Wing-Tip Jihad. In Damascus, a street banner proclaimed, “Oh, heroic journalist, thank you so much for what you have done.” In Beirut, a Hizballah-affiliated journalist, Ibrahim Mousawi, exulted: “It’s the talk of the city. Everyone is proud of this man, and they’re saying he did it in our name.” Ali Qeisi of the Jordan-based “Society of Victims of the US Occupation in Iraq” declared: “All US soldiers who have used their shoes to humiliate Iraqis should be brought to justice, along with their US superiors, including Bush.” And the querulous Lebanese-American professor Asad Abu Khalil, who calls himself “The Angry Arab,” thundered that “the flying shoe speaks more for Arab public opinion than all the despots/puppets that Bush meets with during his travels in the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, according to news reports, “thousands of Iraqis” demonstrated in three cities -- Baghdad, Basra and Najaf -- to hail al-Zeidi as a hero and demand his release from prison, where he has been held since the attack. There hasn’t been this much excitement in the Islamic world over anyone since…Osama bin Laden, whose ascetic visage could be found after 9/11 gracing t-shirts, visors, cigarette lighters, children’s toys and more.

These days, only President-elect Obama’s popularity rivals that of al-Zeidi in Muslim countries. Right after the election, Achmad Sobry Lubis of a virulently anti-American jihadist group in Indonesia called the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI), said of Obama that “we are now very hopeful that he can restore peace in the world.” Another jihadist, Eid Kabalu of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines, declared that Obama “has to reduce U.S. involvement in war, which, in effect, will make global peace reign under his administration.” Ahmed Yussef of the jihad terror group Hamas said that Obama’s election gave the U.S. a “chance for a change, after his predecessor, George W. Bush destroyed relations with the external world.”

It may seem odd that the three most popular people among Muslims worldwide today would be the President-elect of the United States, a mass-murdering jihad terrorist, and a somewhat comical shoe-hurling journalist -- but anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. And that is certainly the common element in the popularity of all three. Many in the Islamic world believe or hope that Obama will be the anti-Bush, and will craft a foreign policy more to their liking than Bush’s -- that is, one involving concessions and appeasement.

It’s also noteworthy, meanwhile, that while “thousands of Iraqis” could be mustered on extremely short notice to protest al-Zeidi’s incarceration, to this day thousands of Muslims have never demonstrated anywhere against Osama bin Laden and his alleged “hijacking” of their peaceful religion -- except on a few occasions when Al-Qaeda has targeted Muslims rather than non-Muslims.

The popularity of Muntadhar al-Zeidi is telling: the shoe-hurler is more popular in Islamic nations today than any Islamic reformer ever has been. The man who subjected President Bush to Arab culture’s ultimate sign of disrespect and contempt is at once more famous and beloved among Muslims than a President who endeavored, whatever may be said of how well-advised or successful his policies have been, to save innumerable Muslim lives by planting free and stable societies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Osama’s popularity in the Islamic world has been obvious for seven years, and yet policymakers in Washington still have not examined its implications. The celebration of the Flying Florsheims of Baghdad reinforces once again the fact that the objects of so much hope in the West, those large numbers of Muslims who love America and abhor jihadism, have yet to make themselves known in any effective way -- despite the fact that so much domestic and international policy, ranging from questions of immigration to the role of Islamic law in Iraq and Afghanistan, depends upon their standing up to the jihadists. Will they ever do so, or are the aims of the global jihad just fine by them? If the shoe fits, throw it.

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)", "The Truth About Muhammad" and the new "Stealth Jihad" (all from Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).

‘I Am Not President Bush.’

At the Hofstra debate, the simple sentence it took John McCain two years to utter.

By Byron York
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 16, 2008, 1:05 a.m.

You can talk all you want about Joe the Plumber, but the moment of the final presidential debate, held last night at Hofstra University on Long Island, came when John McCain said, quickly and cleanly, “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

McCain has been trying for two years to highlight his differences with George W. Bush, but only tonight, 20 days before the election, did he come up with a formulation so straightforward. It wasn’t an accident. “We discovered that the arguments we were making weren’t soaking in, that people weren’t getting it, that he isn’t George Bush,” a key McCain aide told me shortly after the debate. “He’s talked about how he’s opposed the president on certain policies, but one of the things that we had told him to really focus on was to keep the answers clear and simple.” So McCain said it clearly and simply. Given that about 70 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush is doing as president, it made more than one observer wonder what took McCain so long.

It’s fair to say Team McCain was delighted with the way the Bush line came out, and they were also happy that McCain was able to steer so much of the debate to the issue of Joe Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, an Ohio man who confronted Obama this week with concerns that Obama’s proposals would raise taxes on the business Wurzelbacher hoped to buy. In that encounter, Obama told Wurzelbacher, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” It wasn’t exactly what Wurzelbacher wanted to hear, and it made Obama sound like a classic income-redistributing Democrat.

McCain heard about it when it happened — the exchange was played mostly on Fox News — and brought it up at a debate preparation session yesterday. “We were sitting around and he said, ‘Look, I ought to use this. I ought to look into the camera and talk to Joe the Plumber and say this is what I’m going to do, as opposed to what Sen. Obama is going to do.’“ The whole team thought it was a good idea, and so, seated onstage at Hofstra, McCain carried it off perfectly. “Sen. Obama talks about the very, very rich,” he said. “Joe, I want to tell you, I’ll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and be able — and I’ll keep your taxes low and I’ll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees.”

Obama was forced to defend himself at some length, and not very effectively; by the time it was over, McCain had scored a solid win on the Joe issue. And made history, too — in all, the candidates used the word “plumber” eleven times, surely a record for a presidential debate.

As that was happening, members of Team Obama were at their Chicago headquarters, watching the debate with one eye and, with the other, a computer video feed of a private focus group equipped with those electronic dials that Frank Luntz uses on Fox. The private Obama group was made up of swing and undecided voters “in a Midwest state where both campaigns are competing,” one aide told me, declining to say precisely where.

The Obama aides were of course listening closely to what McCain said, but they were also studying what they called McCain’s “nonverbal cues.” “The first huge impression was visual,” the aide told me. “He looked angry, he looked frustrated. It was something that I think people reacted to quite viscerally. People are going to remember the look on John McCain’s face.”

It was, on occasion, kind of an odd look. One of the most appealing things about McCain is that he can’t always hide what he is thinking; try as he might, it just shows in his face. But that can sometimes be a problem in a split-screen close-up televised debate.

When it came to perhaps the most anticipated non-economic subject of the night, Obama’s relationship with former Weather Underground bomber William Ayers, it’s probably fair to say that McCain did not do much damage. In part, that was because Obama knew what was coming. “McCain used — I think it was pretty close to word-for-word the way he has talked about [Ayers] in interviews and on the stump,” the aide told me. “Pretty close to word-for-word.”

The same was true in McCain’s discussion of the radical community organizing group ACORN, with which Obama has sometimes been linked. “There was nothing [McCain] said about ACORN that they hadn’t said in their countless conference calls about it,” the aide told me. “They telegraphed their punches pretty effectively.”

I asked if such predictability made preparing for debates any easier. “It helps,” the aide said.

This was also the only debate that touched on the issue of abortion, when moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS asked whether either man could nominate to the Supreme Court a judicial candidate with whom he disagreed on Roe v. Wade. McCain used the question to disavow any litmus tests for judges, and then brought up Obama’s vote, in the Illinois state senate, against a born-alive protection bill. Pro-lifers were undoubtedly happy to see McCain bring it up, but the Obama aide told me it wasn’t a problem. “When he made the attack on the born-alive legislation, you saw a vertical drop in the dial groups that was pretty astounding,” the aide said. “People didn’t find it credible.” There has been a lot of back-and-forth about what version of the born-alive bill was up for consideration, but you can make a pretty solid case that Obama did indeed do what McCain said he did. Nevertheless, if the aide’s account is correct, people didn’t buy it.

Who won? There seems little doubt that McCain scored many more points than Obama. And if you’re talking about dial groups, the graph lines went straight up when McCain declared “I am not President Bush.” But the experience of the first two debates is that the television audience reacted well to Obama’s demeanor, and their impression of him became more favorable as the debates wore on. That was probably no different at Hofstra.
— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Bush 7, Terrorists 0

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.

On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point."

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that's how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his "documentaries," so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore's morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.

Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes!

As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure project issues, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.

If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which -- according to Rich -- would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.

Rich wrote: "Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough." ("Never Forget What?" New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)

There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.

As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years -- so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

For his thanks, President Bush has been the target of almost unimaginable calumnies -- the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Compared to liberals' anger at Bush, there has always been something vaguely impersonal about their "anger" toward the terrorists.

By my count, roughly one in four books in print in the world at this very moment have the words "Bush" and "Lie" in their title. Barnes & Noble has been forced to add an "I Hate Bush" section. I don't believe there are as many anti-Hitler books.

Despite the fact that Hitler brought "change," promoted clean, energy-efficient mass transit by making the trains run on time, supported abortion for the non-master races, vastly expanded the power of the national government and was uniformly adored by college students and their professors, I gather that liberals don't like Hitler because they're constantly comparing him to Bush.

The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.

That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.

- Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Bush Introduces the Palestinian "Right of Return"

By Daniel Pipes

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Monday, January 14, 2008

U.S. President George W. Bush, left, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, right, are seen during an official departure ceremony at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel, Friday, Jan. 11, 2008. President Bush said Friday that he would return to the Mideast in May to continue pushing the Israelis and Palestinians toward a peace treaty and celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary.(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

The Palestinian “right of return” entered the lexicon of American policymakers in December 2006, when the Iraq Study Group Report urged the U.S. government to support Israel-Palestinian negotiations that addresses what it termed a “key final status issue.” That recommendation came as a mild shock, given that the “right of return” to Israel is transparently a code phrase to overwhelm Israel demographically, thereby undoing Zionism and the Jewish state, and so a notion never before a goal of official Washington.

A year later, White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino adopted the term, though without much notice. Out of seemingly nowhere, she informed journalists at a press briefing on November 28, 2007 that “The right of return issue is a part of the road map and it's going to be one of the issues that the Israelis and the Palestinians have to talk about during … negotiations.”

Indeed, on schedule, “right of return” emerged as a motif before and during George W. Bush’s recent trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, when he mentioned it three times publicly:

· January 4: In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Bush announced himself “optimistic that we can have the outlines of a state defined. In other words, negotiations on borders and right of return and these different issues can be settled.”

· January 9: At a joint press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he referred to the core issues of the conflict as “territory and right of return and Jerusalem.”

· January 10: In a parallel joint press conference with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, he stated that the two-state idea “really doesn’t have much bearing until borders are defined, right of return issues resolved, Jerusalem is understood, … [and] the common security measures will be in place.”

In a different setting, also on January 10, Bush, somewhat elusively, stated his belief that “we need to look to the establishment of a Palestinian state and new international mechanisms, including compensation, to resolve the refugee issue.” Is the “right of return” to be one of those new international mechanisms?

Comments:

(1) Despite the major shift in policy implied by the U.S. government adopting the “right of return,” the media has largely missed the story, as “The Lurker” documents in “Censoring Bush’s call for Palestinian ‘right of return’.” In particular, the Jerusalem Post reported on this reference, then posted a second story denying it.

(2) When the Iraq Study Group Report first appeared, analysts puzzled over the “right of return” mention, as one person close to the process explained: “It’s hard to know whether that language got in there because of carelessness – I know there were many revisions up to the very last minute – or whether it was a deliberate attempt to fuse something to the Bush rhetoric which wasn’t there before.” Retrospectively, it appears that the reference was indeed intentional – and quite successful in its purpose. “The Lurker” concludes, perhaps correctly, that James A. Baker, III, lead author of the Iraq Study Group Report, “has once again become a major factor in setting U.S. Middle East policy.”

(3) This is only one of several problematic statements from the Bush administration, such as the president’s morally equivalent reference to “terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis” or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s calling the Arab-Israeli conflict the central issue of the Middle East and seeing Palestinians as analogous to Southern blacks.

(4) Bush prefaced his January 10 comment by asserting, “I’m the only president that’s really articulated a two-state solution so far,” and he is right. Put differently, he is the only U.S. president to promote a “Palestine” and now to call for a Palestinian “right of return.” More broadly, throughout his presidency, Bush has marched to his own drummer on the Arab-Israeli issue, offering novel and personal solutions to a century-old problem and throwing out the rulebook on Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

(5) One can only guess how often Bush raised the “right of return” in his private conversations with Israelis and Palestinians, and with what intensity and pressure.

(6) Looking ahead, to the last year of the Bush presidency, quoting myself: “should the Israelis resist a joint U.S.-Palestinian position, I see a possible crisis in U.S.-Israel relations of unprecedented proportions.” I am not predicting this will happen but noting that the pieces are all in place for such a development.

(7) Although Bush is “seen by many Israelis as the best friend the Jewish state has had in the White House,” I have long doubted that characterization, and now more so than ever.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Frank Schaeffer- Bush: The Destroyer of Christians

Frank Schaeffer BIO

Bush: The Destroyer of Christians
Posted October 16, 2007 11:02 PM (EST)

Read More: evangelical Christians, George W. Bush, private contractors, War in Iraq, Breaking Politics News

Australian mercenaries working for Americans recently gunned down two innocent women who were members of the Christian minority in Iraq. The meaning of this fiasco should not be lost on us. The fact that the Christian women were shot is part of an underreported "small" tragedy within the gigantic tragedy of the destruction of Iraq. (Full disclosure; my son was a Marine from 1999 to 2004 and was deployed several times to the Middle East.)

Bush is an evangelical Christian. And without the evangelical vote he would not have become president. So it might seem ironic that Bush is personally responsible for the persecution, displacement and destruction of the one million, three hundred thousand-person Christian minority in Iraq. (They fared much better under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein and, along with a handful of Christians in Lebanon and Syria, represented one of the last ancient non-Islamic communities left in the Middle East. According to the Times the community has been almost completely displaced and driven from Iraq following the American invasion and the civil war we unleashed.) But actually Bush's destruction of his fellow Christians is not ironic, because to Bush the Iraqi Christians (including those killed women) weren't "real Christians." According to the theology that has shaped Bush they, like their Muslim counterparts, were part of the "other."

Theology matters. And the theology of the President matters when it comes to trying to understand his behavior. Perhaps you have to have been there, done that in order to understand.

I was raised by evangelical missionary parents (Francis and Edith Schaeffer) who also happened to have quite a bit of personal interaction with the Bush family and other Republican leaders. Mom and Dad often met with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr. and stayed in the White House several times in their capacity as evangelical gurus to the powerful.

Evangelical theology is inextricably linked to the Bush presidency. And evangelicals hold to a born-again world view. To Bush-the-evangelical those murdered Christian women and all the other non-evangelical Christians in Iraq (Armenian, Syrian Catholics, Orthodox and others), are not "saved" because they aren't born-again. Rather they belong to a tradition that sees salvation as a journey undertaken within a liturgical community of faith, not a one time magical individualistic experience.

In public Bush would never call all non-evangelicals lost, nor would many media-savvy evangelical leaders, but the outlook of evangelicals is one of dividing the world into "us" and "them." And non-evangelical Christians are "them" just as much as any other "lost." How could it be otherwise when the bedrock of evangelical theology is to regard anyone who has a different theology than you -- even within the competing historic Christian traditions -- as "unsaved"?

Pat Robertson expressed the evangelical Bush-type theology a few years ago when he dismissed Eastern Orthodox Christianity as just so much "mumbo-jumbo." To the born-again only a Billy Graham-type of one-time salvation experience counts. People who merely continue practicing the ancient traditions of the Church, people just like those Armenian women the mercenaries carelessly shot down, aren't like "us." That belief explains why evangelicals are busy trying to evangelize Greek and Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholics and "liberal" Christians with the same vigor they apply to proselytizing Hindus or Muslims. And that explains why there has not been a massive evangelical outcry against Bush's destruction of the Iraqi Christian community.

According to Bush's theology he has in fact not destroyed fellow Christians. To Bush and other evangelicals the word "Christian" refers only to evangelicals. In the common parlance within the evangelical subculture, "becoming a Christian" is just another way to say that someone has become an evangelical.

The "us" and "them" mentality is instilled in every born-again believer. To evangelicals there are actually two human races; the "sheep" and the "goats" in other words us and them. And the "them" includes all non-evangelical Christians.

Evangelicals may have given up most traditional formal sacraments in favor of a personalized faith but they have developed their own "sacraments." One bedrock sacrament is the aggressive evangelism of the "lost," including all non-evangelical Christians.

The fact that Bush has managed to complete the work of radical Islam, and smash one of the last bastions of Christianity in the Middle East, is just fine with evangelicals: the destroyed people weren't real Christians, just more of those mumbo-jumbo types. It isn't as if we hired those Australians to shoot our fellow believers at some Billy Graham crusade! The murdered women were on their way to see their priest and they wouldn't have needed all that "priest stuff" if they only had accepted Jesus into their hearts and become real Christians like us.

Frank Schaeffer's memoir, "CRAZY FOR GOD -- How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back," will be in bookstores on October 26 and was reviewed by Jane Smiley in The Nation (Oct 15, 2007).

Patrick J. Buchanan: George W. Bush, Globalist

October 11, 2007

http://www.vdare.com/

Patrick J. Buchanan

Have the Bush Republicans ceased to be reliable custodians of American sovereignty?

So it would seem.

President George W. Bush began well. He rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming negotiated by Vice President Al Gore as both injurious to the economy and rooted in questionable science. He refused to allow the armed forces and diplomats of the United States to be brought under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

But now President Bush is about to take his country by the hand and make a great leap forward into world government. He has signed on to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which transfers jurisdiction over the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans and all the oil and mineral resources they contain, to an International Seabed Authority. This second United Nations would be ceded eternal hegemony over two-thirds of the Earth. It is the greatest U.N. power grab in history and, thanks to George Bush, is about to succeed.

Within the Authority, consisting of 155 nations, America would have one vote and no veto. However, we would pay the principal share of the operating costs, as we do today of the United Nations.

In 1978, Ronald Reagan declared, "No national interest of the United States can justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to the Third World."

Rejecting the New International Economic Order that sought to effect a historic transfer of wealth and power from the First World to the Third, President Reagan in 1982 refused to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty or send it to the Senate. Now, Bush, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., have resurrected this monstrosity and are about to ram it through the U.S. Senate with, if you can believe it, the support of the U.S. Navy.

The rot of globalism runs deep in this capital city.

What is the matter with Bush? What is the matter with the U.S. Navy? For the sea treaty grants us no rights we do not already have in international law and tradition—it only codifies them. It siphons off national rights, national sovereignty and national wealth, however, and empowers global bureaucrats and Third World kleptocrats whose common trait is jealousy of and hostility toward the United States.

Under LOST, if the United States wishes to mine the ocean or scoop up minerals from its floor, we would have to pay a fee and get permission from the Authority, then provide a subsidiary of the Authority called the Enterprise with a comparable site for its own exploitation with our technology. Eventually, the Authority would collect 7 percent of the revenue from the U.S. mining site, giving this institution of world government what the United Nations has hungered for for decades: the power to tax nations.

While the treaty assures the right of peaceful passage on the high seas and through narrows that are territorial waters, we already have that right under international law. And for the past two centuries, we have had as guarantor of the right of free passage the U.S. Navy. Now, we will have it courtesy of the International Seabed Authority.

"It is inconceivable to this naval officer," writes Adm. James Lyons, former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, "why the Senate would willingly want to forfeit its responsibility for America's freedom of the seas to the unelected and unaccountable international agency that would be created by the ratification of LOST.

"The power of the U.S. Navy, not some anonymous bureaucracy, has been the nation's guarantee to our access to and freedom of the seas. I can cite many maritime operations—from the blockade of Cuba in 1962, to the reflagging of ships in the Persian Gulf, to our submarine intelligence-gathering programs—that have been critical to maintaining our freedom of the seas and protecting our waters from encroachment. All those examples would likely have to be submitted to an international tribunal for approval if we become a signatory to this treaty. ... This is incomprehensible." [U.S. LOST at sea?, By James Lyons October 5, 2007]

U.S. warships today inspect vessels suspected of carrying nuclear contraband. In the Cold War, U.S. submarines entered harbors to tap into communications cables to protect our national security. Our subs routinely transit straits submerged. To do this, post-LOST, the Navy would have to get permission from an Authority composed of states most of which have an almost unbroken record of voting against us in the United Nations.

Why are we doing this? Do we think we will win the approbation of the international community if we show ourselves to be good global citizens by surrendering our rights and our wealth?

The Law of the Sea Treaty is an utterly unnecessary transfer of authority from the United States and of the wealth of its citizens to global bureaucrats who have never had our interests at heart, and to Third World regimes that have never been reliable friends. That Republicans senators think this is a good idea speaks volumes about what has become of the party of T.R., Bob Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

And they call themselves conservatives.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com.