Making Bush Look Good

By Alan Caruba

It’s taken barely half a year to make George W. Bush look good to a lot of Americans who experienced “Bush Derangement Syndrome” or, like myself, were critical of several of his policies while President.

I imagine Bush watching the evening news these days and just laughing as he watches Obama just “step in it” every time he encounters the same or some new problem with which Bush dealt.
On the issue of taxes, Bush was a dedicated tax-cutter. On the issue of spending, Bush never saw a spending bill he couldn’t sign until deep into his second term. He even advocated a prescription add-on to Medicare, raising its costs and hastening its bankruptcy.

And, of course, there’s the Iraq War which followed his payback for 9/11 during which he chased al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Iraq War began in 2003 and lasted six years to the point where we are drawing down forces or at least moving them out of the major cities to see if the Iraqis themselves can provide security.

A lot of the problems with the conduct of the Iraq War can be traced to Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense who just flat-out got it wrong too many times. On paper Rumsfeld had terrific credentials, but either he was terribly advised by his generals or he didn’t pay them proper attention or both. Wars cannot be fought “on the cheap” or won with too few troops.

Lastly, in defense of Bush, the housing bubble collapsed in October, one month before the 2008 elections following a long period of general prosperity. Indeed, the timing of the collapse has always struck me as very suspicious.

It followed a September 15th electronic run on U.S. banks that put the Federal Reserve in overdrive to stem its effects. By the time they closed the accounts involved, $550 billion had been withdrawn and, without prompt action, $5.5 trillion would have withdrawn and the economy would have collapsed.

As it is, under Obama’s guidance, the Recession he keeps reminding everyone he inherited is now raging from sea to shining sea thanks to idiotic decisions to throw billions at General Motors and Chrysler, both of whom were going to have to declare bankruptcy anyway, and then taking ownership in GM, an unprecedented action and one that runs contrary to a Constitutional prohibition on dispensing public funds to private enterprise.

Obama wasn’t content with that. Having inherited the panicky TARP funding effort, he allowed them to move forward without any insistence that they be used for the provision of credit. That one act alone would have helped stem the credit freeze that is forcing businesses to lay off workers by the thousands. Instead, the U.S. ended up with a sizeable ownership of banks and insurance companies.

If there is one thing that government is famous for, it’s the inability to run any kind of private enterprise. Amtrak hasn’t turned a profit since it began in 1971. With the advent of email, the U.S. Postal Service is in freefall and, if it weren’t for Fedex, nothing would ever be delivered overnight.

On the foreign policy front, the pathetic North Koreans feel free to fire off missiles, Iran’s president Ahmadinejad feels free to insult the President, and China says it hates us for the profligacy of Obama’s crazed trillion-dollar Cap-and-Trade Act and his proposed trillion-dollar healthcare reform program. If you really, really want to destroy what’s left of the U.S. economy, both of these proposals will shovel the last bits of dirt on what is left.

Obama isn’t just our nightmare. He is the world’s nightmare. He is a patsy willing to sit through a 50 minute diatribe against the U.S. by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, a photo opportunity ambush by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and top it off with a very demeaning bow to a Saudi prince. He signaled weakness with his Cairo speech. He has come out in defense of the deposed Communist ex-president of Honduras, putting him in the same company as Cuba’s Raul Castro and Senor Chavez.

He’s off to visit the Russians in a week and they will eat his lunch. Since the days of Harry S. Truman, U.S. Presidents have resisted the Russian’s threats, bluffs, and proxy wars. Obama is not made of such stuff and will probably agree to junk the entire U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for as much vodka and caviar the Russians want to sell us.

About the only thing I which we can count on will be Obama’s endless bleating and blaming of George W. Bush for all the problems he has encountered in a job he so desperately wanted.

Obama’s performance rating, according to Rasmussen, is heading south. It took just over a half year to reach negative status and by the end of the year, Democrats in Congress are going to be hiding in their offices and cloakrooms rather than be seen with him.

War! War! War!

By Alan Caruba

“In defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.” I will tell you who said that at the end of this commentary.

D-Day, 65 years ago, was one of many days throughout history that determined the final outcome of a war. I suspect one can attach a great battle to just about every day in the calendar because the history of humanity is one of constant warfare somewhere, anywhere in the world where two men, two families, two tribes, two empires, or two or more states clashed.

The courage that Americans, joined by Canadians, British, Free French, Polish, and other troops showed on June 6, 1944 preserved freedom for a bit longer among the victors, though all of Eastern Europe had to be written off as the bribe to keep Soviet Russia involved. It would ultimately loose 20 million of its people.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 199,000. People forget that the Japanese emperor and the military, though clearly defeated, refused to concede.

War is the natural element of mankind. Peace is merely the interlude between wars.

Man is the most dangerous creature on Earth and young men, in particular, are either conscripted into armies or will just as likely form gangs to fulfill the desire “to seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”

Every time I hear Barack Obama talk of diplomacy, I can hear guns being cocked or missiles being positioned. He is surely the most naïve President since the days of Woodrow Wilson who get elected promising keep the U.S. out of World War I and then, after committing U.S. troops, he went to Europe to participate in the writing of the Versailles Treaty where the British and the French ate his lunch. They divided up the spoils, punished Germany, and set in motion World War II before the ink was dry.

Wilson returned home with his dream of a League of Nations and the U.S. Senate shot it down, preferring to maintain our sovereignty than to get in bed with the knaves that started WWI.

That fool’s dream of an organization to ensure world peace was revived by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and signed into being by his successor, Harry S. Truman, who probably had little choice in the matter. Its first Secretary General was a Soviet spy named Alger Hiss, a communist who had risen high in the FDR government.

The world has always been a dangerous place because it has always been full of egotists and psychopaths who have seized or gained power in one fashion or another. Alexander tried his hand at a Macedonian empire. Rome laid down some fine roads and used them to ensure their hold on a widespread Mediterranean empire. Attila knocked on the doors of Europe. The Visigoths and other barbarian tribes sacked Rome.

The Church sent forth crusades in response to the military aspirations of Muslims to seize and hold Jerusalem, holy to Christian and Jew. The Muslims or Moors had already spread far into India and northern Africa, up into Spain. Their northern drive into Europe was stopped at Poitiers, France in 732 AD and on September 11, 1683 they were decisively defeated at the gates of Vienna.

In the last century, the Empire of Japan murdered thousands, if not millions in China while waging war to control Asia. In Europe the Nazis redefined barbarism and depravity.

War! War! War! Diplomacy is merely the process by which war may be delayed a bit and the terms of surrender are determined by the winner. Diplomacy has never stopped a despot from pursuing war. It has merely rescheduled it.

In 1986, Osama bin Laden formally declared war on the United States. He is still at war with the United States whether anyone is paying attention or not. And we are not. The Iranians, as crazed as bin Laden, have made their intentions clear by declaring “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel” every single day since seizing our diplomats in 1979 and holding them for 444 days.

After 9/11, George W. Bush did not hesitate to pursue war against bin Laden in Afghanistan and against a man, Saddam Hussein, and nation, Iraq, that were the object of dozens of useless United Nations resolutions as an instigator of wars. Obama’s response has been to denigrate our military achievement in Iraq and demand that Guantanamo be closed down.

Barack Obama is going to get a lot of Americans killed with his poetry about diplomacy.

The lessons of history are lost on this fool. Buchenwold concentration camp and the beach at Normandy are just background for “photo ops” to this greatest of narcissists. He is too busy waging his own war on America while seeking yet another stage on which to strut.

To become a nation in its own right America took on the greatest military power of its time, Great Britain, and won. It fought Barbary pirates. It waged a bloody civil war for its soul and won. It fought Mexico and added territory by winning. It fought Spain. It fought insurgents in the Philippines. It fought two world wars. It fought Communists in Korea. It fought them again in Vietnam. It forced the Russians to back off in Cuba. It fought Communists on the island of Granada and it fought a drug lord in Panama. It fought Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. It fought the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it again fought a despot in Iraq. We are still in both these places.

On September 10, 2001 Americans thought they were not at war with anyone. They were wrong. The only thing that has kept us from another attack was the policy enunciated in the quote with which I began this contemplation of war and peace. The man who said it is former President George W. Bush. The date was November 19, 1999.