Missing George W. Bush

By Alan Caruba

It's not fashionable to speak well of Obama's predecessor, but it grows more difficult by the day to find anything good to say about the incumbent President who recently opined that Americans are “lazy” and have "lost our ambition." As I recall he spent his first year in office going around the world apologizing for what he deemed America’s past sins and exceptualism.

No, I am talking about George W. Bush, often referred to as Bush 43. I think historians are going to treat him more kindly than might seem likely to some at this point almost three years since the current President took the oath of office in January 2009. Bush43, with Trumanesque self-discipline and modesty, went home and has not spoken out about his successor’s decisions in office, neither to criticize nor praise. That’s how presidents are expected to behave.

Bush43, however, did begin writing a memoir of his eight years in office called “Decision Points” and, when it was first published, it became a bestseller. It is available now in a softcover edition from Broadway Books at $18.00, but already discounted to an affordable twelve dollars and change on Amazon.com. As a longtime book reviewer, I received the softcover edition and have been reading it in lieu of watching the horrid stuff that passes for television these days.

I begin with a confession that, throughout his two terms, I had a good opinion of George W. Bush. I disagreed with his No Child Left Behind approach to education and I thought that adding a prescription benefit to an already broke Medicare was unwise. I had some qualms about the creation of the super agency, Homeland Security, and the Patriot Act. By the time the “surge” in Iraq arrived, I thought it was a bad idea to have invaded even though I understood the threat that Saddam Hussein posed in the region. As it turned out, other Middle East dictators began to fall like dominoes in the wake of the U.S. action.

Bush’s book surprised me. I had no idea of the depth of his religious faith and how it sustained him through the trial of 9/11 and other difficult times such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. This is a man who begins his day by reading the Bible. Frankly, I found that comforting.

I looked upon his presidency as being part of the “family business.” His grandfather, Prescott Bush had been a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. His father, George H.W. Bush had served as Ronald Reagan’s Vice President before being elected President in his own right. What comes through George W’s memoir is his deep love for his parents, his brothers, and his own family, wife Laura and his twin girls.

The memoir is not some coldly intellectual analysis, but rather is infused with his own emotions as he dealt with crisis, the greatest of which—9/11—turned him into a wartime president. I think he met the challenge of the first attack on the homeland since Pearl Harbor and one that took the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans, including first responders.

When Bush visited the site of Ground Zero in New York amidst the still smoking ruins, a soot-covered firefighter “looked me in square in the eye and said, ‘George, find the bastards who did this and kill them.’ It’s not often that people call the president by his first name. But that was fine with me. This was personal.”

What distinguishes “Decision Points” is the fact that it is devoted to explaining why he did what he did during his two terms. We need to remind ourselves of the times in which those decisions were occurring and, perhaps, to remember how frightened the nation was in the wake of 9/11.

That fear gave way quickly to the leadership Bush provided; his decision to invade Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda, the creation of “Gitmo” as a place to hold non-state combatants and the reorganization of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to better coordinate their ability to share information. In the eight years that followed, no further attacks were successful.

That stands in contrast with President Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed. It was filled with “I did this” and “I did that” and never once mentioned that it was possible only because of the machinery that George W. Bush had put in place. Indeed, Obama had wanted to close Gitmo and try the planner of 9/11 in a civil court with all the protections the U.S. Constitution provides Americans. Both proposals were abandoned after widespread opposition.

Bush’s second term ended under a cloud from the housing mortgage crisis that required extraordinary efforts to avoid the collapse of the nation’s financial system. It obscured Bush’s tax cut, signed into law in May 2003, that led to economic growth for 46 consecutive months and resulted in an unemployment rate that averaged only 5.3 percent during his presidency.

There is much more that can and will be credited to George W. Bush for his two terms and, given the failure of the present administration to reverse the recession, to turn the tide on unemployment, to have increased the national debt to a level that exceeds all previous presidents in just three years, and to have been the first to see the nation’s credit rating downgraded, the contrast is too great to ignore.

Elections do have consequences. In both cases, the elections of George W. Bush were “squeakers” that might have put Al Gore or John Kerry in the White House. I think America dodged a bullet, but then forgot how important it is to put someone in office who will protect the nation and grow its economy. 2012 will give us another opportunity to do that.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Education of Barack Obama

By Alan Caruba

Just over two years ago when Barack Obama was sworn into office, he might have needed help to find Libya on the map and Muammar Gadhafi was just another Middle Eastern despot.

Despite a whirlwind tour of the Middle East, I doubt he had any idea that the Maghreb of north African nations, from Tunisia to Egypt, or that Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain would be in varying states of turmoil, but neither did anyone else. He had little to say during the protests against Iran’s mullahs.

The last thing Obama wanted was to be a “war President.”

Even in his address to the nation regarding the U.S. intervention in Libya, he could not resist chiding his predecessor. “To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq,” he said without naming George W. Bush, his favorite fall-back position for blame. Then he added that the war in Iraq has lasted eight years, cost thousands of lives, and a trillion dollars. The one in Vietnam lasted almost as long and was just as costly.

Unmentioned was his decision to not only remain in Afghanistan where the U.S. has been since 2001, but he increased our troop strength—just as former President Bush did with the “surge” that turned things around in Iraq. The result of Obama’s decision has been to keep al Qaeda on the run and a continuing effort to degrade the Taliban. Unsaid is the fact that guerrilla wars are generally long, drawn-out, and often inconclusive.

The conduct of war is the job the Constitution assigns to the President by also authorizing him to be the Commander-in-Chief. Obama, the community organizer, is uncomfortable with this responsibility, but he put those skills to use to pull together a coalition, get a U.N. resolution, and let loose the dogs of war, if only from the skies.

What he failed to do was consult with the Congress and either ask for or get a resolution of support. He’s supposed to do that, but the former university lecturer on the Constitution either forgot that or decided to ignore it. That, however, is a very bad precedent.

“I refused to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves,” he said and, frankly, I believe him. He drew on the lessons of former President Clinton’s difficulty to get the U.S. involved in stopping the ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia.

The reluctant war President, however, took pains to tell Americans that “The U.S. will play a supportive role” in Libya’s liberation and only the seriously uninformed could believe that tall tale. There is no military action in Libya without the U.S., now and into the unknown future.

In almost an aside, Obama spoke of Iran, “where change is fiercely oppressed.” He hasn’t had much to say of Iran and this suggests he wanted to send some kind of message to the ayatollahs that he was keeping an eye on them as he should. They are gearing up to make events infinitely worse in the Middle East.

What Obama has discovered—and should have known—is that America has been the world’s policeman since the end of World War II way back in 1945. It’s the reason that former President Truman ordered U.S. troops into the field when North Korea attacked South Korea. It’s the reason Americans happily elected a former five-star general, Ike Eisenhower, to guide the nation when he promised “I will go to Korea” to personally inspect the demilitarized zone.

“We should not be afraid to act,” said Obama regarding the various unpleasant choices we have before us and those that are sure to come and then he emphasized “collective action”, falling back into his favorite role as an organizer, rather than a warrior.

In truth, Obama is not a warrior. Unlike many prior presidents he never wore the uniform of his nation and he clearly finds war distasteful, a distraction from imposing domestic change on Americans who have proven resistant and who are likely to send him home to Chicago in 2012.

“We welcome the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East,” the President said. Somehow I doubt that. For decades this nation has been more than happy with the status quo in the Middle East so long as the oil flowed. Those days are over.

It was a decent enough speech that touched on all the key points. Gadhafi is a despot. He threatened his people. Our interests and values are at stake. All the things one would expect him to say, but none of the fire, the “bring’m on” swagger we have missed since 9/11. Like him or not, George W. Bush made us feel safe. Obama makes us feel tentative.

America has real enemies and, frankly, I want them to be very afraid of us. They were once, but when even a cockroach like Gadhafi thinks we won’t or can’t kill him, I want his head on a pike for all the rest of the world to see.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Teeny, Tiny Wars

By Alan Caruba

On the same day that the U.S. had blown up a building on Gadaffi’s compound in Tripoli, the news out of Iraq was as follows:

Baghdad (3/21/2011) – Aswat al-Iraq: Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki considered on Monday Iraq as one of the most stable countries in the region. Addressing a gathering attending the third agricultural week in Baghdad, the premier said, “Iraq became one of the most stable countries in the region after a period of violence and divisions.” He urged ministers to speed up solving all problems and improving services to Iraqis. Demonstrations sweep a number of Arab countries, mainly Libya, Syria and Yemen, calling for toppling regimes and achieving political reforms.

THANK YOU, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

How ironic is it that a war that many Americans now regard as a mistake is, from the Iraqi point of view, one that has led to an era of stability?

Military observers and historians regard wars differently than civilians. The terms they use are “high intensity” and “low intensity.” As Sean Linnane, editor of the Stormbringer blog notes, “In the eight years of Iraq, we lost just as many people as we lost in a single day at Normandy. By the same standards, Vietnam was a low-intensity conflict. We lost just under fifty thousand over ten years, whereas we lost that many in three years in Korea and in three days at Gettysburg.”

Linnane explains how the technology of modern war has changed the way it must be understood. “An infantryman with a shoulder-fired weapon negates a 55-ton tank.” Such weaponry allowed Stone Age mujahideen in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviet Union.

“While at the same time,” Linnane correctly points out, “the amplifying effect of the modern media allow tiny symbolic conflicts to gain great meaning.”

I am beginning to think that any action or no action that President Obama took would have satisfied anyone because we Americans feel it is our constitutional right to criticize the President and it is!

Obama has been getting a crash course in foreign affairs for two years. Before taking office, he was your average intellectual airhead, full of theories and Marxist dialectics, and having no clue what the job required. By contrast, George W. Bush had grown up around the office his whole life and, if you recall, his father had actually been President.

Surrounded by political advisers, generals from the Pentagon, so-called national security people, State Department folks from Foggy Bottom, and other interested, partisan parties, Obama has had to learn how to become “the decider” like Bush43. For Obama who has basically voted “present” in public life, that has neither been easy nor welcome.

What Obama discovered was that, if he just did what Bush had done for the eight previous years, it would probably be the wisest course of action. So Guantanamo is still open for business and Obama even increased U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The withdrawal schedule for Iraq was already in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, so he cannot take credit for that.

There’s a really good reason for pulling our troops out of both Afghanistan and Iraq and, if possible, sooner rather than later. A lot of them have been rotated in and out of both locations so many times they are just bone tired and thoroughly disgusted with the people for whom they have been trying to provide a shot at freedom, democracy, or whatever passes for life without some dictator or Islamic fanatic trying to kill them.

In a very real way, both Bush’s set in motion the Middle East tumult by demonstrating that dictators can, indeed, be overthrown. The Arab street may say it hates America, but it looks to it to come swooping in to defend and save them.

For many years to come, the whole of the Muslim countries stretching across northern Africa and the Middle East are going to be a working definition of bedlam. To name a few, in addition to the recent demands for less repression in Egypt and Tunisia, plus the present unpleasantness in Libya, the following nations are seeing similar popular discontent—Bahrain, Yemen, the Sudan, and Somalia.

In trouble to a greater or lesser degree, there’s Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan, and the hate-filled denizens of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Poor Lebanon has labored under the fist of Syria and now Hezbollah.

By comparison, Israel is an island of peace as is Qatar, and, dare we say it, IRAQ!

All of which means a succession of teeny, tiny wars over the years ahead, some of which the U.S. will choose to engage to a larger or small extent. We will not let any ill befall Saudi Arabia because it has a lot of O-I-L. Other oil states will likewise get varying levels of protection. Gadaffi was denied this because of his history of crimes against the U.S.

Americans will, as they always have, hate having to engage in any of these predictable conflicts, but we shall, even if it means that this president and future ones will have to do a two-step around the Constitution and War Powers Act. The dirty secret in Washington, D.C. is that no Congress since World War Two (1941) has actually declared war because they are essentially political cowards who don’t want the blame if anything goes wrong as in Vietnam.

If the U.S. wasn’t totally broke and totally unwilling to cut taxes and spending, we might actually be able to afford some greater effort to help keep the world safe, but for now, we shall have to stick to Tomahawk missiles and other such devices to inform our enemies that we want them dead.

Did I mention that Iraq is stable? No war going on there? A democratic regime in power? I can hear George W. Bush laughing all the way from Houston.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

In the Conservative Reading Room

By Alan Caruba

With Christmas around the corner, it’s probably a good idea to look at some books that conservatives would enjoy and from which they would benefit.

Decision Points by George W. Bush ($35.00, Crown) is, of course, receiving a great deal of attention as the former president gives interviews to promote it. Reportedly 4,000 people showed up at a book signing opportunity in Houston to purchase it (already heavily discounted at Amazon.com). The book is a useful insight to why W did what he did at the time he did it. What emerges is a man who is comfortable in his own skin and with his beliefs. As he says, he will be gone by the time history makes a judgment of his performance in office, but for now the book provides an understanding of what it means to live history and make history one day at a time. Intelligence analysis is not always correct. Threats to national security must be evaluated. War, says W, is always the last option on the table. The publisher has printed 1.5 million copies. It will likely be a bestseller.

Rules for Radical Conservatives by David Kahane ($25.00, Ballantine Books) is a stab at conservartive humor. Liberals assume that conservatives have no sense of humor, but that is not true. Anyone who has listened to Rush Limbaugh knows and enjoys the laughs he serves up along with pithy comment. Kahane has penned a wickedly funny expose of what actually goes on in liberal enclaves. Those who read the National Review are already familiar with him and know the name is a nom de plume. Trying to figure out who he really is has become a parlor game of sorts. His is the persona of an insufferable Hollywood liberal inadvertently spilling the beans on their intentions to “transform” the nation. This book arrives just in time to savor the retaking of the House by the Republican Party and glimpse some hope of doing the same in the Senate and White House in 2012. Until then, it will prove entertaining for the right-winger in your life.

Selling Out a Superpower: Where the US Economy Went Wrong and How We Can Turn It Around by Ronald R. Pollina ($26.00 Prometheus Books) Are you still wondering why America and its economy are in decline? Then this is the book you must read. Economics may make your eyes glaze over or even just sound boring, but this extraordinary book by a man who has worked for decades with companies seeking to relocate or find a State congenial to their growth will prove to be a shocking explanation of what is wrong with the economy. I guarantee you that it is not boring. For example, I bet you do not know that in 1968 there were 62 lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and that today there are 34,000! They outnumber member of Congress and their staffs by a margin of two to one. By 2008 they were spending approximately $8.2 million for influence every day. Few represent the majority of Americans in the middle class. And that is why the real median household income in America has stagnated for more than a decade. The farther the nation has drifted from the constraints of the Constitution, the greater the central government has grown, strangling the economy with massive regulation, rising levels of taxation, and literally driving companies and the jobs they provide offshore. No single book I have read this year comes close to explaining what has occurred and what must be done to avoid a bad, sad future for the current and next generation of Americans.

The Patriot’s Toolbox: Eighty Principles for Restoring our Freedom and Prosperity is a guide that can be had by going to http://www.teapartytoolbox.org/. Directed at members of the Tea Party, it has eight chapters, seven of them previously published by The Heartland Institute as booklets in a series called “Legislative Principles” and one written specifically for this book. I heartily recommend this guide that will bring the reader insight and information regarding areas of concern and action that include health care, energy and the environment, school reform, privatization, and much more. The Institute is a non-profit, free market advocate for reform. It has been a major factor in the demise of the global warming hoax, sponsoring a series of international conferences that brought together the world’s leading scientists and others to debunk this fraud. The book was distributed to 34,000 candidates for public office and nearly 20,000 civic and business leaders, Tea Party activists, and Heartland supporters. They book can be requested for free, but I would urge that you support the Institute with membership or a donation you can provide.

The Energy Imperative by Phil Rae and Leonard Kalfayan with Michael J. Economides ($34.99, ET Publishing, Houston, TV) should be mandatory reading for every college or university student because he reads very much like a textbook and, for that reason, I would recommend it to anyone who is confused by all the talk about “green energy”, “Big Oil”, “dirty coal”, the usual hogwash the environmental organizations and politicians put forth to hide the fact that the United States and all other nations are totally dependent on energy and that so-called fossil fuels are essential to their existence. They are “the master resource” and the nations that use the most energy are also the nations that enjoy the best economies. This book was written so that anyone can read and understand the fundamentals of energy and its use. I guarantee you will be the smartest person in the room when you read this book.

Energy and Climate Wars: How Naïve Politicians, Green Ideologues, and Media Elites are Undermining the Truth About Energy and Climate by Peter C. Glover and Michael J. Economides ($24.95, Continuum, New York and London) address the ideological social agenda that is being driven more by myth than facts. I count both authors as friends and am frankly in awe of their individual and combined knowledge and insight regarding an issue that will determine whether the U.S. continues to rank among the great powers of the world or not. Right now the Obama administration is doing everything it can to destroy the coal mining industry, has stealthily shut down exploration and drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and is spending billions of public dollars on the least effective forms of energy, solar and wind, despite the fact they represent about one percent of all the electricity the nation requires. Glover is a British writer and journalist specializing in political and energy analysis. Economides is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston. He is the editor of Energy Tribune and what he does not know on the topic is probably not worth knowing.

The False Promise of Green Energy by Andrew Morriss, William T. Bogart, Roger E. Meiners, and Andrew Dorchack ($24.95, Cato Institute) will not be available until February 2011, but it knocks the propaganda and lies about “green energy” into a cocked hat. Sold as better for the environment, less polluting, and a whole new arena of new jobs, these and other claims are examined while exposing a large, vocal alliance of special interests—corporations, politicians, and environmentalists—who expect to reap billions boosting it. One problem has emerged for these hucksters. The Chicago Climate Exchange, created to buy, sell and trade “carbon credits” just closed shop in the wake of “Climategate”, the news that the Earth is not warming and that the data about global warming was cooked up by a handful of rogue climate scientists working with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Naturally, the mainstream media that wrote many stories about its opening ignored reporting its demise. Green energy is part and parcel of the multitude of lies told about the environment to enrich those telling them.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

And they called Bush a Moron

Three Photos That Tell the Whole Story

The Difference Between Wearing the Jacket and Flying the Jet

It's Not the Age of Aquarius. It Never Was.

By Alan Caruba

While watching the Tony Awards Sunday evening, a portion of the show included an excerpt from the revival of “Hair”, a Broadway show devoted to the excesses of the 1960s when words like “hippie” became part of the national vocabulary.

By the 1960s I had already graduated college and served in the U.S. Army. I was a journalist at the time so I had opportunities to observe and report upon various events and personalities of the era. I was in my twenties, but I recall being appalled by the ethos of a new generation that abandoned all the traditional values that most Americans shared at the time.

I thought then and now that the hippies represented an immaturity and irresponsibility that one associates with the worst aspects of adolescence. The Tony Awards segment only reaffirmed my feelings and I found it no less offensive than when the show first offered its view of America, the use of illegal drugs, the so-called sexual revolution, and other justifications for refusing to grow up.

Admittedly, I liked some of the songs and so did much of the nation. When it opened on Broadway in April 1968 several of the songs became top forty hits. A film adaptation was released in 1979. The revival opened on Broadway on March 31, 2009 and was embraced once again by the critics, mostly likely for its anti-war theme which was originally focused on the war in Vietnam and now fits in with opposition to the war in Iraq that helped get Barack Obama elected.

It seems to me that the 1960s marked some invisible line between the America that held strong, patriotic and traditional values, and a unity that has not existed since then. While only a handful of those growing up during that decade became hippies, those that did bequeathed a tolerance for drugs that became a social problem that remains to this day.

The 1960s was a decade of incredible turmoil, occurring as it did when the Civil Rights movement hit full stride. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and not long after Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian immigrant.

While plunging deeper into the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson let loose a “Great Society” series of programs in the name of helping the poor and the disadvantaged, along with the inevitably slothful members of society who can never be counted upon to work.

Barack Obama is attempting to do the same today, issuing “stimulus” checks and massive government-run takeovers and programs instead of allowing the free market system to correct itself as it always has.

In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion, a form of license for “free love.” Forced busing in the name of equality became the law, quotas made their way into the workplace and colleges in the name of “fairness”, but consuming everyone’s attention was the Vietnam War.

“Hair” was about not wanting to fight that war, about “dropping out and tuning in” as the drug culture became a permanent part of the American scene, but mostly it was and is about self-indulgence as characterized by letting one’s hair grow long. The musical’s characters pursued the "bohemian" life in New York.

The America in which I had grown up was characterized as a bad place.

I didn’t like much about the 1960s and I had to live through it. The 1970s was no picnic either. It featured the one-term idiocy of Jimmy Carter.

For a brief respite, Ronald Reagan reintroduced a mature approach to the way a great nation must behave, but he was replaced by the feckless Bill Clinton whose Oval Office antics tainted the role of the presidency. A no-nonsense former Texas Governor took over. After 9/11, we got through until now unscathed because he was not inclined to be nice to our enemies. For this, he was vilified by Democrats and those who supported Barack Obama.

The youth-oriented culture of the 1960s has returned in the person of Barack Obama who got elected by opposing the war in Iraq and promising “hope and change”.

The bill has come due for the financial excesses of the previous decade, as much the mark of immature, reckless behavior as anything else by those who came of age in the 1960s.

Obama is the worst combination of LBJ, Carter, and Clinton. Much of the cloying media treat him like a rock star.

The nation is on the threshhold of abandoning the vision of its Founding Fathers and the dictates of the U.S. Constitution. Driving that transformation is a narcissistic man-child and an ideologically besotted Congress that refuses to acknowledge the laws and truths of science, economics, and the reason America came into being; the focus on individual liberty backed up by a limited federal government.

It is not the Age of Aquarius. It never was.

Mr. Wonderful

By Alan Caruba

Years ago there was a Broadway show, “Mr. Wonderful”, built around Sammy Davis, Jr. On the matinee that I saw it, Davis decided he was too tired or bored to continue and called the second act to a close by turning to the audience to tell them how the show ended and sing a short encore.

No one complained. After all, he was Sammy Davis, Jr., already a famed member of the Las Vegas “rat pack” that included his pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

For many in the mainstream media Barack Hussein Obama is Mr. Wonderful.

Obama’s growing problem, however, is that a lot of people are already beginning to complain about his act. He is already the object of derision for never going anywhere without a Teleprompter.

He probably thinks he can get away with it, but Mr. Smooth, Mr. Imperturbable, Mr. Wonderful, is growing old and doing so quickly.

When “Sixty Minutes” reporter, Steve Kroft, opened his half-hour interview with Obama, he did so noting that, other than his political campaign, Obama had no previous executive experience. Kroft looked increasingly skeptical and even uncomfortable with the President.

At one point Kroft chided him for treating the financial crisis and other issues with a smile that came too easily in the course of discussing them. Obama referred to it as “gallows humor” but few people are smiling at the prospect of rising unemployment, housing foreclosures, and business failures.

Obama’s studied effort to portray himself as in control of events and issues is less and less convincing.

It was instructive when, on the same Sunday, the uber-liberals of The New York Times, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, were both busy expressing doubts about Obama and his advisors. Even the editorial reflected dissatisfaction.

In a piece titled, “Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ arrived?” Rich bluntly wrote that, “To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck.”

Transparency and oversight, however, was supposed to be the job of Congress and various regulatory agencies that utterly failed to act on repeated warnings about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the activities of hedge funds such as the one run by Bernard Madoff, and the general practices of the banking and investment community.

In “Toxic R Us”, Dowd who apparently is still enamored of Michelle Obama took note of the symbolic vegetable garden being planted behind the White House. “The tableau of Michelle Obama hoisting a pitchfork on Friday with her sinewy arms and warning that the commander in chief would be commandeered into yard work left me wondering if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.”

Whether the right Obama, Barack, is also the right man to be in the Oval Office during this time of crisis is being voiced by New York Times columnists and a whole lot of other people barely two months since his inauguration.

For his part, Obama told Kroft that many of the decisions that arrive at the Oval Office are between the bad and the worse choices.

So far, however, Obama has endorsed and repeated nearly all the errors made in response to the Great Depression; raising taxes instead of cutting them, rolling out costly “stimulus” programs instead of instituting changes that will make it easier for small business owners to survive, offering financial assistance to people who should not have received mortgages in the first place, and attacking banks and bankers instead of reassuring them that their government is going to help by removing their “toxic paper” in order to let them get back to lending.

Simply giving the banks billions appears to have been foolish in the extreme, but so were the meaningless “stimulus” checks dispensed during the last year of the Bush administration. What Americans have been witnessing are responses to the crisis that we might expect from children as opposed to people who presumably know how the financial system is supposed to work.

From Jay Leno to Sixty Minutes, increasingly Obama’s problem is seen as being over-exposed in the truest sense of the word. His weaknesses are being exposed despite his bravado. People are noticing. It worries them.

If you think the media chatteratti and just ordinary folks are worried, consider what it must be like for the heads of state of allies around the world? Consider, too, that our enemies are beginning to think that the President of the United States is, at heart, weak.

Think back now to the feeling of confidence we had following 9/11 when President Bush showed up at Ground Zero and promised swift retribution to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Think about the many United Nations resolutions Saddam Hussein had ignored and the satisfaction you felt when he was toppled from office, fished out of a hole in the ground, and finally hung.

George W. Bush was a victim of Hurricane Katrina like all those folks along the gulf coast, but probably no one was more surprised than he to discover how incompetent the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans were, along with his own director of FEMA.

Katrina has become the perfect example of how poorly a huge, centralized government functions in a perfect storm.

Bush just soldiered on through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and other problems. You knew he would do his best and his best would get us through.

You can’t say that about Barack Obama.

Move Over, Slick Willy!

By Alan Caruba

Does it seem to you that Obama is seeking to dominate the news cycle with a lot of appearances on television? If so, you’re right. This is a presidency that understands that a large portion of the population will respond to the mere fact that he is on television, but not to the specifics of his message.

Even so, he is a masterful orator. He is so relaxed, so smooth, so apparently in control of his alleged facts, and has such a light touch when he needs it to inject a bit of humor that he challenges the likes of former President Bill Clinton for the moniker of “Slick.”

The contrast with former President George W. Bush is particularly sharp. Bush was one of the least articulate speakers, subject to all kinds of distracting quirks when he spoke, prone to malapropos, and an accent that most people associate with good ole’boys having a beer at the local bar.

Despite that, we tend to forget that Bush got most of his bills through Congress, especially spending bills like the Medicare Prescription program and “No Child Left Behind”, a liberal education program for which few have anything good to say. He was, however, unable to convince either Congress or most Americans that Social Security is a ponzi scheme that must inevitably fail.

Obama is utterly charming and beguiling and he knows it.

He has arrived at the Oval Office with one of the thinnest resumes for any actual achievement, other than running for office, of any prior President. At least Clinton and Bush had been governors, a common platform for the leap to the White House.

I hear from a lot of people who say the same thing. Obama scares them.

They have good cause. Few people are aware of the influence that Frank Marshall Davis had on the adolescent Obama. Davis was a newspaper journalist, poet, and organizer for the Hawaii Communist Party, part of the CPUSA. Born in Kansas, living much of his life in Chicago, he moved to Hawaii in 1948. He would claim that he had been “brain-washed for years after the Bolshevik revolutions.” An Afro-American, one can easily see how Obama would identify with him while being raised by his white grandparents.

When you combine the way Obama was marinated in communism during his teen years and, after an Ivy League education, followed his mentor’s footsteps to Chicago where he studied the techniques of “community organizer”, Saul Alinsky, the separate threads of Obama’s path to the White House begin to come together. Alinski literally wrote the book on how to deceive people into accepting communism.

Little wonder the inclusion of a major revision in healthcare was discovered buried deep in the so-called “stimulus” bill. The socialist healthcare programs in Canada, in England, and elsewhere are a horror. Imposing a socialist healthcare program on America has nothing to do with job creation and everything to do with expanding an ever growing and ever more intrusive government bureaucracy.

And yet Obama’s actual election margins are slim. He won by 53% in the general election with 46% of the voters choosing other candidates. Very nearly half of the voters did not and presumably still do not support him. They are the ones who are scared and they should be.

“We won” in a constitutional republic does not mean you are free to govern by executive order and with a majority in Congress that is determined to impose the largest spending bill in the history of the nation.

The refusal to compromise, a rush to impose legislation without the traditional debate and discussion process, and a cult around the man in the White House is a danger to the republic.

With less than a month in office, Obama has managed to unify the Republican Party in ways we have not seen in decades. They understand the danger even if they don’t have the votes to deter it.

Goodbye, George W.

By Alan Caruba

After eight years as President, we would probably be thinking unkind thoughts even if it was the Dalai Llama who held the job. In the case of George W. Bush, saying goodbye comes as a distinct relief. As with all modern day Presidents, we just have seen too much of him over the course of eight years.

I felt the same about Bill Clinton when his second term mercifully came to an end, but that feeling was also tinged with the disgust I felt then and now for disgracing the office with his White House intern antics. How and why he has found forgiveness with Democrats or anyone else still eludes me.

Reporters and others keep saying that what you see is what you get when it comes to George W. If so, he is surely one of the goofiest Presidents we have had, afflicted with a variety of mannerisms and ticks that have made him easy fodder for impersonators and comics.

I cannot shake the feeling that the man lacked seriousness or at least the intellectual depth to grasp the events and issues that came to his attention daily. There really seemed to be a “frat boy” at the core of his personality. It often seemed that, as the oldest son, he was just engaged in the family business of running the country.

Even so, I thought Bush’s response to 9/11 was right on target. Learning that Osama bin Laden was headquartered in Afghanistan, he sent the CIA and the military there to chase out the Taliban. Failing to capture bin Laden, he could have stuck to covert efforts, but he went beyond the initial action, invading Iraq for what I am sure he saw as the greater needed to draw in al Qaeda to destroy it. Simply said, he succeeded. Al Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of what it was when it attacked the U.S. in 2001. Bin Laden issues weak messages from hiding.

So, perhaps history will be more kind to him than present opinions. The rest of his eight years, though, hardly merit hosannas. He spent and he spent and he spent. He introduced legislation that only a liberal would consider; the No Child Left Behind Act, the Prescription Medicine benefits on top of a Medicare program that was already running out of money, the failure to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

George W. could just as well have been a Democrat. He leaves with a popularity rating so low that it rivals Harry S. Truman who was a Democrat. Here again, though, history has proven that many of Truman’s decisions were the right ones.

His farewell address was dignified, but not without the fumbling over simple words and phrases now so familiar to his inability to deliver a speech without these stumbles. It is not his speeches, however, by which he will be remembered, but by his enduring faith in the spread of freedom and democracy.

The result of his tenure is, after three decades of despotic control, an Iraq as a young democracy. It is an Afghanistan struggling to throw off the oppression of the Taliban, the spawn of a duplicitous Pakistan, itself struggling to be something, anything more than just another junta-run excuse for a nation. Bush has strengthened ties to India and to China. Burned by his initial confidence in Vladimir Putin, he has kept Russia bottled up to some degree.

His humanitarian instincts are seen in programs to deal with AIDS and Malaria in Africa, but his reputation will rest ultimately on his role as Commander-in-Chief. Here again, history may speak well of him in hindsight.

We may look back on the Bush43 years with some nostalgia, if not for the man, then for the fact that we did not suffer another attack like 9/11 and that you knew he would not let that happen on his watch.

On Being a Republican

By Alan Caruba

It has been hard to be a Republican this past year and those leading up to the last elections. If Democrats found their voice in their bitter hatred of George W. Bush, his actions over the past four and previous years in office left Republicans breathless as both he and the Republican-held Congress engaged in an orgy of bewildering spending.

As power passed from the Party in 2006, one would have hoped for a more chastened, more sober Republican Party, but the momentum had shifted and the Democrats found a charismatic candidate in Barack Obama.

The choice of John McCain, though opposed in many Republican and conservative circles for his inclination to vote with Democrats, his pro-immigration position, his espousal of global warming falsehoods, left us with a choice between two candidates for whom no Republican could vote for without distaste and disdain. The introduction to the political scene of Gov. Palin was too little, too late. Her family problems just keep growing.

It is no accident that America is mired in a financial disaster that mirrors an era when “irrational exuberance” reined. The sins of George W. Bush are too numerous, but the legacy of No Child Left Behind was to cede control of the schools—always a local priority—to the federal government. All the statistics in the world will not hide the fact that we are graduating students ill-prepared for the workplace and those who want to acquire a higher education must accept a level of debt that is obscene. In my home State of New Jersey, the loan defaults are reaching a billion dollars.

“We must keep the American people informed of the Democrat’s efforts to impose socialistic, inefficient, and dangerously utopian policies in Washington,” wrote Robert M. “Mike” Duncan, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. What could have been more socialistic than the addition of a prescription entitlement to Medicare? It was a Republican initiative. Same with No Child Left Behind.

“Despite the election’s result, American remains a center-right country,” wrote Duncan. “We will learn from our experience, sharpen our message, and continue to stand for our core principles of low taxation, personal responsibility, and strong national security, and earn victories in elections to come.”

Where were those Republican principles since the year 2000? It is telling that the only success Republicans can point to is that since 2001 the nation has not been attacked again. There is no guarantee that future attacks will not occur. A bulky, oversized bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security has put the CIA in charge while undermining the FBI’s traditional role of counter-intelligence on the domestic front. Are the security agencies working better together? We have no way of knowing.

There is no question that the incoming Democrat Party will tilt toward the unions such as those that undermined Detroit’s competitiveness. There is the possibility of massive tax increases at the worst possible time for such actions, and there is the threat of limits on free speech such as the discredited notion of “balance” in the talk radio and television.

Worse, though, is the fact that the Obama administration will base its most fundamental policies on a global warming that is not happening and which has been proven to be a hoax based on falsified “scientific” data. The corruption of science is a crime against humanity. The imposition of regulations and laws based on global warming will cripple the nation’s economy further and leave us without sufficient energy sources for the future.

So, this Republican will renew his membership in 2009 and pray that the Party regains its courage, its discipline with regard to its core principles, and finds legislators and new candidates to articulate the dangers inherent in Democrat Party control of the nation.

Put him on his shield

By Alan Caruba

Paul Weyrich died early Thursday morning. I knew the man only through his writings as a columnist and I was always a bit envious of how prescient he was.

Two months before the November election he wrote that, “the loser might very well be the lucky one.” I suspect John McCain might agree as he and the rest of us gaze at the chasm of indebtedness into which the alleged “leaders” of our nation have plunged us and future generations.

Back in September, Weyrich was warning that, “The problems include a very weak American dollar; a trade deficit that will come to roughly $700 billion at year-end” along with “a ballooning Federal budget that has gone from $2.1 trillion to $3.6 trillion in just eight years—a whopping growth of 76%; a national debt of $9.6 trillion, closing fast on $10 trillion with a debt ceiling placed at $10.6 trillion and which cost the American taxpayer $230 billion in interest alone last year.”

Weyrich was a Conservative with a capital “C” in a nation whose best years occurred in the 1980s when another Conservative, Ronald Reagan, was in the White House. After that, it has been downhill on a toboggan to the poorhouse. Sadly, the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1994 and began so splendidly fell prey to whatever it is about Washington, D.C., that causes people to lose their minds.

The George W. Bush legacy will ultimately be less about 9/11 and more about the most profligate spending spree in the history of the nation.

Weyrich began his political life as a volunteer for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and, for more than four decades, he rose to become a leader in the conservative movement as chairman of the Free Congress Foundation and as the first president of the Heritage Foundation.

Weyrich stayed true to his conservative principles and was always ready to champion them. That’s why he could write that “successful administrations over the past forty years all bear a share of the responsibility” for the present financial crisis.

“There is no free ride in this world,” wrote Weyrich. “And government at all levels, not only in Washington, has failed to understand this.” Who failed us? WE failed us because ultimately the Constitution identifies us, the People, as responsible for those whom we select and the kind of governance we accept.

Now, like an honored warrior, it is time to put him on his shield and consign him to the God in whom he believed and to history which he distinguished with his life.

The Cult of Obama

By Alan Caruba

David Limbaugh, a widely read conservative columnist, recently wrote about the “Obama cult factor” and what it portends. From my point of view, however, it is one thing to rise to the highest office as the apotheosis of hope and change, and quite another to deal with nasty reality.

Limbaugh rightly worries about Obama’s cult status, but in the 24/7 glare that the modern presidency endures, the ability to keep the great herd of liberal voters who bought into “Yes we can” is now facing, “no you can’t” get a job, keep your job, pay your mortgage, put your children through college, buy a second car right now, take a vacation trip, et cetera.

It’s also worth remembering that very nearly half of the voters cast theirs for John McCain and Sarah Palin, not “the One.”

If reality bites, it will be President Obama who will feel it nipping at his exposed backside as he tries to navigate from getting elected to being elected to thinking about getting re-elected.

Every White House does its best to control the news, but an economy with the prospect of major unemployment and all the disruptions that come of that cannot be controlled in any real sense of the word. That’s why FDR spoke of fear as his primary concern in his first inaugural speech and why during the two terms that preceded the start of WWII in 1941, he and his merry band of socialist experimenters never came up with a solution to the Great Depression.

Fast forward to Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson suddenly discovering that all those bad mortgage loans Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had been securing weren’t worth spit and the banks that held those loans, bundled as securities, had nothing of value in the vault.

Now all those people who spent the last eight years hating George W. Bush can look back wistfully at those years in which the neither the government, nor they exercised any restraint on spending. Like co-conspirators or enablers, we all watched as Bush and the Congress aspired to spend the entire national treasury on local projects like bike paths, museums devoted to the mighty artichoke, and an Alaskan bridge to an island that can be accessed in under two minutes by boat.

This may explain why Obama has surrounded himself with people from the Clinton administration instead of bringing in fresh faces, new ideas, and bold new programs. This is why Obama has already done "a 180" on withdrawing the troops from Iraq in 2009, closing Gitmo, and a host of far left hopes and dreams.

To his adoring cult members, this kind of thing will get a pass initially, but wait until January 20, 2009 when Mr. Smooth, Mr. Cool, Mr. Calm is also Mr. President. Running an election campaign when you have gobs of money and a retinue of adoring facilitators is one thing. Running a nation whose economy is coming apart at the seams is a whole different ballgame. You can’t do it with good makeup, the right lighting, and speeches that sound like you retained Bush’s speechwriters.

While Congress is balking at giving Detroit’s auto manufacturers any money before, of course, giving them money, the consensus seems to be that bankruptcy would be a good thing. It would let them restructure without a lot of the baggage that has left them unable to compete with the “other” auto industry in America’s south that is doing just fine.

The line at the bail-out window just keeps getting longer and includes a couple of governors whose states did not require that they balance the budget before acting like Santa Claus. The public is already restive and unhappy with the notion that we can spend our way out of this mess when anyone with a functioning brain knows where the problem is.

It’s Congress. It’s too much spending. It’s too much borrowing. With Congress as our example, is it any surprise that ordinary Americans have been doing the same thing? And who has besieged us for years to live on credit? The banks that no longer want to loan anyone any money!

That’s why the only hope for Obama would be to vastly reduce the size of the federal government and eliminate much of its endless regulations that suck $1 trillion a year out of the economy. That will not happen.

Worse for him will be a bunch of idiotic global warming laws when most people above the age of five have figured out there is no global warming, that oil is now cheap again, and that “clean” energy depends on the wind blowing and the sun shining all the time; something neither does.

So I think the cult that elected Obama will be the first to desert him just as soon as they find themselves in the unemployment line.

Republican Remorse

By Alan Caruba

Just barely a week passed the election, a tsunami of Republican remorse is sweeping over the party and those who identify themselves as its members. It’s not pretty, but it is all too human and all too necessary if the GOP is not to remain in the political wilderness any longer than necessary.

For those of us who quite simply underestimated the charisma of Barack Obama, the words “President-elect” are jarring. We were so sure that John McCain could pull out a victory or, at the very least, were praying for some kind of miracle. There are, however, no miracles in politics, only votes, and in our system they have the final say.

It was, however, impossible to ignore the huge crowds that came out for the man we mockingly called the Messiah or “The One.” The contrast between the cool, self-assured Obama and McCain, particularly during the debates, was striking. If you turned off the sound, what you saw was McCain with his eyes blinking furiously, his hands flailing the air, and that smile of his that seemed to beg people to understand that he really was a very nice man.

McCain, who we had reason to believe would be a polished campaigner by now appeared to have no idea how to run. Maybe it was just the crushing realization that all the fates had conspired against him in this last hurrah. He had the burden of George W. Bush, a failing economy, and even a hurricane that delayed the opening of the Republican convention. He even believes in global warming despite the fact the Earth has been cooling for the past decade.

And, let’s say it—he ignored the fact that Obama had vanquished the powerful Clinton faction within the Democrat Party to thwart a woman candidate who had demonstrated considerable popularity of her own. So what did McCain do? He selected a woman as his vice president running mate! In retrospect, that was a form of political suicide, but at this point disappointed Republicans are actually bandying around the notion of running her in 2012. No, sorry, time for Gov. Palin to go back to Alaska. And stay there.

Having gained control of Congress in 1994 after forty years of Democrat dominance, Republicans went after Clinton with a vengeance and he “triangulated” by adopting programs that he now claims were his! Let us be gracious and say that the Democrats put forth two utterly lame candidates in Gore and Kerry. Were it not for 9/11, George W. Bush would not have his name—writ large—into the history books temporarily chasing the Taliban out of Afghanistan and invading Iraq.

As it is, it does not take a degree in economics to know that eight years of profligate spending and borrowing, topped by a war that is now into its fifth year, must be judged severely in retrospect. They cost Republicans the election.

In the near term, the Republican Party has to begin to stand for something other than horrible fiscal policies, bad military judgment coupled with a foreign policy that angered allies and enemies alike, and a hubris that has cost us dearly.

It should be said, however, that the nation has been so evenly divided politically for decades that whatever changes occurred in the red and blue map of the nation are more likely temporary shifts than long term predictions. If Democrats can return John Murtha to office and Republicans can re-elect a convicted Ted Stevens, anything is possible.

If President Obama turns out to be a pragmatist, he may just surprise a lot of people who have seen him up to now as a dedicated socialist with plans to reshape America, but the truth is that Americans has been adopting socialism for a very long time.

It goes back to the 1930s and 40s with FDR and moves forward unrelentingly through the all the presidencies and every Congress since. Most recently, there was the costly addition of a prescription program to Medicare that was advocated and passed by Republicans. Massive farm policy giveaways have been around long since they became unnecessary and wasteful. Et Cetera!

Just as Democrats could not believe they were being defeated by the likes of George W. Bush to the point of insisting he “stole” it (pretty funny for folks whose Chicago machine is famous for such tactics), Republicans need to take a deep breath and begin to formulate some policies that an entirely new generation of conservatives can agree upon.

We need to be less of a war party. Americans are quite thoroughly sick of war and military engagements. They were sick of it after ten years in Vietnam and they are sick of Iraq.

We need to move beyond abortion as the sole litmus test of political purity. It is the law of the land and has been now since the 1960s. Some battles, even the most noble, are just simply lost. Even Republicans have abortions.

We need to become the party of energy. We need to insist that America’s vast oil, natural gas, and coal reserves be tapped, along with the building of many more nuclear plants for the energy America will need by 2030. There is no such thing as energy “independence”, but there is a need for sensible energy policies, something Democrats have thwarted for decades.

Republicans have to fight to protect the Internet and talk radio from censorship. The Democrats hate both, except to use the former to raise campaign funding.

I could go on, but the message is obvious. WE LOST. GET OVER IT!

We had weaker candidates, weaker arguments to address the fiscal crisis that included a massive “bailout” using the public treasury to literally buy interest in banks and insurance companies (sounds socialist to me). Now we’re being asked to do the same for some auto manufacturers who bargained poorly with their unions and built cars a lot of people didn’t want to buy.

Republicans need to renew their commitment to smaller government, real fiscal prudence, fewer foreign entanglements (can you say ‘United Nations’?) and, of course, pride in and adherence to the U.S. Constitution.

Or, as one wag has suggested, “We’re all Democrats now.”

Election Post-Mortem

By Alan Caruba

Every time a political party loses an election, someone pronounces its death. The Democrats and Republicans, under one name or another, have been around from the beginning of the nation whether they were called Whigs, Federalists, or Dixiecrats. The once solidly Democrat South became Republican after the Civil Rights movement succeeded.

Those of a certain political philosophy will always find a home in one party or the other.
This may also explain why the Green Party, the Constitution Party and the Libertarians never seem to gain any ground. Their agendas are far too narrow or extreme to attract people who, from both sides of the political spectrum, simply want America to prosper.

There’s a pretty good explanation why the GOP lost the White House and his name is George W. Bush. This is why it frequently appeared that Barack Obama was campaigning against him and not John McCain. This wasn’t just a political ploy, this was a political reality.

Bush will leave the White House as unpopular as former President Truman. In Truman’s case, historians have since concluded he was one of the best presidents we’ve had for his role in containing the spread of Soviet communism and saving Europe via the Marshall Plan. If in fifty years or so the Middle East looks different in terms of more democratic forms of government and exporting something other than terrorism and oil, Bush may be judged less harshly.

Obituaries for the Republican Party are premature. Its loss, however, was entirely predictable. Washington, D.C., no matter which party attains the reins of power, corrupts them by virtue of the enormous scale of money at stake. Politics is about money because the game in the nation’s capital is predicated on who gets to control—dare I say it—its redistribution.

This explains, for example, why my home state of New Jersey only gets 61 cents back on every dollar it sends to Washington. Life is unfair said John F. Kennedy and this is quite true when it comes to the way money is spent by the federal government. The worst of it is the mind-boggling waste of millions on programs that, once in place, never seem to end.

The Republicans, traditionally thought to be more prudent and sophisticated regarding the nation’s economy, proved to be as profligate as the widely-perceived “tax and spend” Democrats. That’s because power is a drug and an addictive one at that.

This brings us to a fundamental truth about our President-elect and the new Congress. There is going to be a lot less money available to do the many things they want. The economy has, for the near term, been ruined by the very people we sent to Washington to protect, preserve, and increase it.

The only way that the Democrat majority and White House can acquire money for their agenda or just to keep the wheels of government turning is to borrow it. This nation, however, is so deeply in debt that it needs, as much as possible, to stop borrowing. This is not going to happen. Just watch the returning Congress for a taste of what is yet to come.

Democrat policies dating back to the days of Jimmy Carter are responsible for the credit crunch and mortgage meltdown. Even the pro-Democrat Wall Street went into a slump on news of Obama’s victory. Republicans, when in power, expanded an already troubled entitlement program, Medicare, by adding a prescription program. At the behest of the President, they have engaged in a dubious war in Iraq with the Democrat votes needed to maintain it. It wasn’t until the height of the Vietnam War protests that Congress finally summoned the courage to cut off funds for it.

What America needs most is a period of rest and recuperation.

It needs to get its fiscal house in order.

It needs to reduce its military involvement in places that do not directly affect our national security.

It needs to abandon programs based on a global warming that is not happening.

It needs to tap its own extensive oil, natural gas, and coal reserves, along with building more nuclear plants for the increased electricity it will soon require and to keep its fleet of cars and trucks on its roads.

None of this will happen. An empire doesn’t work that way. It grows until it implodes. That is the history of Rome, Great Britain, France, the Russians and every other nation that exhausted itself in the quest for global hegemony.

Electing the Second Choice

By Alan Caruba

This is shaping up to be a very strange election.

Consider that both parties are, in effect, fronting candidates that are at best their second choice. The Democrats wanted to nominate Hillary Clinton and now have buyer’s remorse with Barack Obama.

The Republicans had a field of candidates that did not seem to please any of them. Remember the excitement when Fred Thompson got in the race? When John McCain emerged the winner of the primaries, the conservative base of the party put on mourning clothes.

The problem for Republicans is that President George W. Bush turned out to be more liberal than they could ever have imagined; never vetoing a single funding bill until late into his second term, pushing for the federalizing of the nation’s educational system, and ignoring the illegal aliens. His domestic agenda got a pass because he was at least aggressively chasing the Taliban and ridding the Middle East of Saddam Hussein.

Whoever is elected in November is going to inherit a nation in financial distress and the voters already know they will be handed a bill by the federal government as it struggles to restore trust in the banking and investment systems.

The mess, of course, is the result of its own machinations and Wall Street’s natural predatory instincts. Neither candidate looked comfortable at Thursday’s White House emergency meeting with the President, but then nobody else in the room looked happy.

The Friday night debate was uninspiring. If you had a preference when you tuned in, you surely did not change your mind. If you were still undecided, age and experience seemed to be McCain’s trump card while Obama remained as aloof as usual. There is too much of the academic, the professor, in Obama. McCain still loves a good fight.

The problem for both candidates and for Congress is that, when you’re running an empire called America there’s a point at which you realize it is just too damned big. McCain talks of reducing the size of government and he is right. Obama has plans to add to it with billions more in “social” programs about healthcare and education. He is very wrong.

The Romans found out about being too large around the time the Vandals and the Visigoths were at the gates. All roads led to Rome and facilitated its sacking. Let us hope we are not witnessing the sacking of the taxpayer although, at this point, it rather looks like that. Why we expect the people we elect to high office to be smarter than the rest of us remains a mystery.

The first half hour of the debate was about avoiding the financial catastrophe. Not once was the Federal Reserve mentioned. Its cheap money, easy credit policies are a big part of the present problem. Neither candidate actually suggested getting rid of Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. Why remind people that their government is at the heart of the mess?

Foreign affairs was the scheduled topic and did occupy a fairly boring second half of the debate, but Americans tend not to be much interested in what is happening elsewhere unless it involves a war or threat of one. We have an increasingly short attention span even for wars in which we are involved.

Chosen by a system that needs a complete overhaul, neither candidate evokes a great deal of enthusiasm. The winner in November could well be just a caretaker until the financial system rights itself and that is not likely to be any time soon.

When Republicans Act Like Democrats

By Alan Caruba

My friend, Don Devine, in addition to being a vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, edits its “Conservative Battleline” and is a contributor to it. If you want to know how and what a true conservative thinks, you could do no better than to read Dr. Devine’s writings.

In a recent commentary, while examining the impact of the choice of Gov. Sarah Palin to the McCain ticket, he took a look at the last seven years of the Bush Administration. He did so from the perspective of having served in the Reagan Administration where he earned the sobriquet, “Reagan’s swift sword.”

“Let us be very frank. National government non-defense spending has hemorrhaged to historic highs during the last seven years under George W. Bush and Republican Congresses."

“Spending increased by an all-time modern high of 25 percent over his first term and an additional 14 percent so far the second, vastly exceeding any period since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – before the bailouts and plus adding the largest new entitlement since Goldwater’s opponent, in the form of Medicare prescription drugs.”

“As far as regulation is concerned, the last year of the Carter Administration produced 73,258 pages of regulation, which Reagan cut back to 50,616 pages. By the end of the Clinton years, the number of pages was back up to 64,438. But the Bush Administration ended 2007 with 72,090 pages – almost back to where Reagan began.”

“And now we have a whole new regulatory scheme where Federal bureaucrats will decide subjectively which loans are ‘bad’ and how much each banker will be paid for them. Stay tuned for the abuses and favoritism.’”

I doubt any conservative could be comfortable with the solution that Congress and the White House has arrived at to avoid what everyone seems to agree would be a financial meltdown of our banking and investment system.

The economic life of our nation is driven as much by emotion as by hard facts. Even the now unlamented Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke of “irrational exuberance” at one point. He was, in retrospect, part of the problem.

What Devine’s succinct review of the two Bush terms in office reveals is a total indifference to any fiscal prudence or restraint. Bush never vetoed a spending bill until after the 2006 midterm elections when Republicans lost control of Congress.

It should be noted, however, that the current financial crisis is almost entirely a Democrat creation, put in place during the Clinton years, based on the belief that poor people have some kind of right to live in homes that they can’t afford. It forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to abandon prudent procedures. Both parties, though, can share the blame for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that distorted accounting practices in the wake of the Enron scandal.

A lot of politicians and other people combined to create the present mess, but a President puts the imprint of his personality and policies on the mood of a nation. The message too many Americans got was like the famous New Orlean’s motto, “Laissez le bon temps roulez.” Let the good times roll.

In 2005, the good times ended for New Orleans courtesy of Hurricane Katrina. No matter who is elected, the “good times” for the nation is ending as the Bush Administration begins to pack and make ready to leave.

Political parties are guided by fairly identifiable ideologies. When the Republicans abandoned theirs to become in effect Democrats, they betrayed conservative principles and opened the doors of power to a Democrat Party that ill-serves our present and future needs.

The Death of Orthodox Islam

By Alan Caruba

Wars are won and lost by the calculations made by those that start them. The Japanese Empire destroyed itself when it attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By contrast, the Vietnamese War was lost because President Lyndon B. Johnson never understood that it was, first, a war of liberation from colonial France and, second, a civil war. Within the LBJ White House and over at the CIA, no one had any realistic idea of who they were fighting.

Iraq has been deemed “the wrong war in the wrong place” by people who, decades hence, will be deemed very wrong in their judgment. One of its critics, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, said not long ago, “The war is lost.” He’s wrong. Other spineless Democrats are wrong.

Other critics pontificate that all we’ve done is allow an Iranian puppet government to take over Iraq, but they underestimate the nationalism that Iraqis feel and the long lingering memories of the losses they had when Saddam Hussein waged war first against Iran, then against Kuwait, and finally produced not one, but two bloodlettings as Americans with allied help, ultimately rid them of their pathological despot.

And, of course, that great military leader, Sen. Barack Obama, who first denied the surge worked and then declared it did, keeps insisting that we should have first taken care of business in Afghanistan. What this ignores is that Iraq became the perfect killing ground, luring in wannabe jihadists from all over and sending their sorry butts to Hell.

The result is that al Qaeda, who started this war by attacking our peacekeepers in Beirut in the 1980s, blowing up our embassies in the 1990s, and finally, attacking our homeland to destroy the Twin Towers and taking lives at the Pentagon as well, is seriously degraded. Angry letters pass between their raggedy leadership complaining of poor results and low morale.

These days U.S. drones, loaded with hellfire missiles, are systematically killing those al Qaeda leaders who thought they had the perfect hiding place along Pakistan’s northern border, only to be disabused of that further miscalculation as they die.

Throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, al Qaeda and other jihadists are being hunted and killed.

Bin Laden may be alive but it no longer matters. Throughout the Middle East and even in the heart of the most orthodox practice of Islam, in Saudi Arabia, opinions are shifting and the tides of social change are on the move. In a decade or two they will shed their seventh century outlook and wonder that they were ever so backward and barbaric.

For that you can thank President George W. Bush and the Neocons who understood the lessons of history, who understood that 9/11 had to be dealt with by punishing the enemy, Islamofascism, until the price for it was too harsh to pay.

“The Muslims have seen with their own eyes that bloodshed leads to nothing but destruction, devastation, isolation, and persecution.” So said Saudi liberal, Salah Al-Rashid on the website Elaph.

What lessons have Muslims drawn from Bin Laden’s attack on 9/11? Al-Rashid said that Muslims now understand they “must pursue a culture of peace and eschewing bloody wars and conflicts.” If 9/11 was a wakeup call to Americans that we have real enemies in the world, it brought Saudi and other Muslims “to their senses and awoken them from their slumbers…”

In an article in the Saudi daily, Al-Watan, Ali Sa’d Al-Mussa, a journalist and a lecturer at King Khaled University in Abha, wrote that 9/11 was a watershed moment between the era of Islamist-led Saudi public discourse and what he deemed “the modern era” a mere seven years later!

“The 45 minutes between 8:45 AM and 9:30 AM on September 11, 2001 were unlike any other 45 minutes in the modern history of humankind,” wrote Al-Mussa. “These minutes made it impossible for the world to revert to its former state…” He meant, of course, his world, the Saudi world, the world of the Middle East, trapped in the seventh century demand for endless aggression against any part of the world that did not accept Islam.

Osama bin Laden has destroyed the thing he treasured most, orthodox Islam as practiced in his homeland of Saudi Arabia. He destroyed the myth that Muslims could and would come together to fight the infidel and would triumph.

The real triumph has been the rise of Western civilization, free of the restraints of orthodox Islam. The real victory will be the realization that the only future Saudis, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and all others in the Middle East must embrace is one of toleration and of modernization. The alternative is death and destruction.

It took an American war to make that happen! It took the vision of men in the White House to see it and the courage to pursue the war despite those who declared it wrong or lost.

It wasn’t the first time American warriors went to the Middle East to put an end to piracy, hostage taking, and the violence and death that Islam venerates. It won’t be the last. Keep your eye on Iran, home to Islamists who have not yet learned that lesson.

That’s something that Sen. John McCain understands. That’s something his opponent, with a mere 143 days spent in the Senate chambers, may never understand.

Here's a link to an article by an international business consultant, Bob Kingberry that augments my post on this topic:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20011208&slug=satrdr08

There is No Bush Third Term

By Alan Caruba

Between now and November 4 you are going to hear over and over again the phrase “the Bush third term.”

Let’s understand something. George W. Bush is not running for a third term. He is prohibited by the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution which says, “No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice…”

The phrase, “the Bush third term”, bespeaks how utterly insane the very existence of George W. Bush has driven Democrats and their fellow travelers. In their hearts, they want to campaign against George W. Bush who twice defeated their pusillanimous candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, two of the greatest blowhards to have ever trod the campaign trail.

In both cases, unable to cope with the final vote tally, the Democrats cried out that the election had been “stolen” from them as if to say that the voters had been too stupid to grasp the merits of their choices or too lazy to have come out in sufficient numbers. How could it be that a Republican and theoretical conservative have been elected?

How can they campaign against a President who never vetoed a spending bill that Congress sent him for his first six years in office? How can they campaign against a President who embraced Teddy Kennedy’s No Child Left Behind Act that federalized the nation’s education system? How can they campaign against a President who signed the Medicare Prescription Act that added millions more to a virtually bankrupt social welfare system? Bush has been an incorrigible Democrat when it came to domestic politics and policies.

Where Bush differed, however, was his pursuit of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the projection of American power in Iraq. How awful Bush was to remove a pathological despot, Saddam Hussein, from power! How awful Bush is to have deployed troops and encouraged allies to degrade al Qaeda to the point that no one has heard from Osama bin Laden in months and those around him keep ending up dead.

It took from 1994 to 2006 for Democrats to wrest back control of Congress from Republicans and that was largely due to the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. However, in 2008, voters can rightly conclude that America has won that war, thus eliminating it as a wedge issue.

Somewhere in the back of the minds of voters, too, is the realization that under George W. Bush the United States has not experienced another attack since September 11, 2001.

Further exasperating Democrats is the fact that the Republican choice for the presidency, John McCain, so often supports parts of their agenda that they have to pretend he isn’t the real GOP candidate!

Sen. McCain, that bi-partisan and non-threatening endless campaigner, just plods along, while their shooting star can’t help but scare the bejeepers out of voters as they begin to conclude that he is completely clueless and inexperienced.

So the Democrat campaign is now less and less about Sen. Barack Obama and more and more about the non-candidate, George W. Bush, a constitutional has-been as of January 20, 2009.

This is so insulting to voters that, by the time they have heard “the Bush third term” for the umpteenth time, they are likely to think it’s really not such a bad idea after all.