Settings
About Us
Categories
Search
Archives
Links
Miscellany
W. calling out Rush for being a douche?
For all the snarkiness I throw President Bush’s way its always good to remember that he is a gentleman and, in the end, truly presidential.
Of course I expect Mr. Levin et al to now patiently explain to me why Rush isn’t a Real Conservative™.
Jamie posted this at 6:58 PM EST on Monday, January 18th, 2010 as George Bush Rules!
Just to keep everyone updated on Obama’s use of the dread signing statements:
Legal scholars said the administration’s new approach, which avoids repeating claims of executive power that the White House has previously voiced, could avoid setting off fights with lawmakers. But the approach will make it harder to keep track of which statutes the White House believes it can disregard, or to compare the number of laws challenged by President Obama with former President George W. Bush’s record.
Yes, that’s right, rather than telling us what portions of laws it thinks are unconstitutional as the Bush administration did, Obama notes what portions are unconstitutional and then keeps that information under wraps, reserving the right not to enforce certain sections of the laws without telling the public as much.
Lots of us defended signing statements as little more than the administration’s public pronouncement of its opinion of the finer points of certain legislation. “Tyranny!” came the response. “Abuse of executive privilege!” “Like George III all over again!”
I ask you, which executive abuses its authority: the one who gives to the public its opinion on the law, or the one who doesn’t and merely lets the public guess? Signing statements were a step forward for executive transparency, but those who spent 8 years decrying them as the spearpoint of Caesarism have gotten their way. Perhaps it’ll be better to sit in the dark surrounded by unseen cockroaches rather than to turn on the lights and see the filth.
Apollo posted this at 4:55 PM EST on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 as CHANGE!, George Bush Rules!, We don't need no stinkin' Constitution
One imagines that if George W. Bush had accused Democrats of bearing false witness, there’d have been much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. It seems as though President Obama is not as wise as his predecessor and has blundered that trap:
Repeatedly invoking the Bible, President Obama yesterday told religious leaders that health-care critics are “bearing false witness” against his plan.The fire-and-brimstone president declared holy war in a telephone call with thousands of religious leaders around the country as he sought to breathe life into his plan for a system overhaul.
Without naming anyone specifically in the 10-minute conference call, Obama said opponents had been spreading lies.
“I know that there’s been a lot of misinformation in this debate and there are some folks out there who are, frankly, bearing false witness,” Obama said.
“I need you to spread the facts and speak the truth.”
(H/T)
As Charles Francis Adams once said about another Democrat, Obama “is in one sense scripturally formidable, for he is unquestionably armed with the jawbone of an ass.”
Hubbard posted this at 12:35 PM EDT on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, George Bush Rules!
Dorothy Rabinowitz today is well worth reading.
The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.
He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them.
Who would have believed that this politician celebrated, above all, for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answer—the same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign, searching for their meaning.
I’ve complained numerous times (e.g.) that, for all the hubub about what a great speaker Obama is, the only thing he has ever persuaded anyone of is that he’s a great speaker. I can’ t say I’m surprised in the least that he cannot sell health care.
Let me be a little provacative: When Obama speaks, Americans say, “What a clever man is Obama.” When George Bush spoke, Americans said, “Let us march on Bagdhad.”
This is, of course, a gross oversimplication. But it’s also true. George Bush, for all his supposed inability to speak and all his supposed stupidity, was able to approach the American people with an originally unpopular idea and convince them that he was right. His argument wasn’t “Listen to me because I’m George Bush;” instead, it was “listen to me because overthrowing Saddam is the right thing to do.” The failure of George Bush’s second term rests largely on his decision, conscious or not, to stop trying to persuade his fellow Americans of the correctness of his ideas.
Obama’s argument, mostly, is that we should listen to him because he’s Obama. But no one in America has that sort of inate political power. We’re a spirited people who don’t take kindly to being told what to do. Obama’s inability to persuade, despite the supposed cleverness of his speeches, will continue to be the signal weakness of his presidency. And we will not again have a successful president until someone appears on the political stage with the ability and desire to persuade us that he’s correct.
Apollo posted this at 9:15 PM EDT on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!, Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!
Here is an interesting and informed post regarding North Korea’s imminent missile launch. It’s amazing how, these days, we have a missile defense system and can reasonably expect it to work. This wasn’t the case that long ago, and for those of us with extraordinarily long memories might remember back in 2000, whether or not to fund missile defense research was a controversial campaign issue. Al Gore and the serious people of the world pooh-poohed the idea, regarding it as fanciful that we could ever do such a thing, thus research then was just wasted money.
George Bush, though, and some of us fellow knuckle-draggers thought in more simplistic terms. “Government should defend the people. Shooting down other countries missiles is better than letting them hit us. If we never fund this research, then we’ll never develop the technology to do this.” Those were my thoughts at the time.
Well well well. Here we are in the distant future of 2009. We don’t yet have flying cars, but we do have the ability to shoot down another country’s missiles. And, whadyaknow, one of those “rogue states” the idiot Bush talked about in 2000, a member of that “axis of evil” the moron Bush talked about in 2002, appears now to have the ability to make an atom bomb, and appears ready to launch a long-range missile over one of our closest allies toward us.
I remember back in 2000 being simply flabbergasted that some people opposed investment in missile defense. I hope some of those people will now look back and realize where they went wrong in their thinking.
P.S. Do also remember that missile defense only came to pass because the unilateralist cowboy Bush abandoned the ABM treaty, something that brought about much outrage from the left but seemed fairly commonsensical to many of us.
Apollo posted this at 5:00 PM EDT on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 as George Bush Rules!
The Journal says Obama is vindicating Bush on Iraq. It quotes the president at the end:
We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime — and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government — and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life — that is your achievement; that is the prospect that you have made possible.
He opposed the first two, and if it were up to him the third would not have been possible. I haven’t read the text, but I’m going to presume he didn’t note as much in the speech. Perhaps, when the best selling Speeches of President Obama is published, it will have a footnote: “Personally, I’d rather have Hans Blix still playing cat and mouse with Saddam, and the Iraqi people suffering under severe sanctions.” Perhaps.
When the actual history of this war is written – not the myopic journalism that has passed for history thus far, but real history written with the perspective of knowing how things turned out – it will be noted that a leader of great foresight and courage led this country to war, freed a nation from oppression, and created an ally in a hostile region, and that he did so over the opposition of villains and clowns. That his success was so overwhelming that even the election of one of those clowns – running on an anti-war platform – to succeed him could not reverse it, will add more to our former president’s reputation than to his successor’s.
Apollo posted this at 1:53 PM EST on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 as George Bush Rules!, Iraq
Fact 1: Oliver Stone keeps making movies that cover topics I’m interested in. See 1, 2, 3, 4.
Fact 2: Oliver Stone keeps making movies that bore me to death. See 1, 2, 3, 4. See again 1.
Fact 3: The previews for W. make it look interesting.
Fact 4: The previews for Alexander made it look interesting.
Fact 5: There is a fantastic movie to be made about George W. Bush. And it may include a [tiny] part of the left’s weird insistence that the last 8 years are best understood as a mediocre son trying to outdo his heroic father.
Fact 6: That movie will not be made by Oliver Stone.
Existential Whine 1: Why must the Hollywood director whose interests most closely correspond to mine be an unrepentant Communist?
Apollo posted this at 7:47 PM EDT on Monday, October 13th, 2008 as Film Rants, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!, Ourselves
Dr. Krauthammer is on the record as not being a fan of Sarah Palin. So it’s telling that he now comes to her defense:
There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.
He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”
She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”
Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”
Wrong.
I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.
Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush doctrine.
Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.
It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
For what little it’s worth, the first, second, and third Bush doctrines still seem reasonable to me. It’s the fourth that’s problematic, since a majority of the people can be wrong a majority of the time.
Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM EDT on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 as George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!, Kraut-hammered
Gerald Posner, on those destroyed CIA tapes.
Apollo posted this at 1:52 PM EST on Friday, December 7th, 2007 as George Bush Rules!, Journalism
Dr. K on Bush and the embryonic stem cell debate:
“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”
— James A. Thomson
A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.
Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.
Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.
Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, to borrow Thomson’s phrase, Bush was made “a little bit uncomfortable” by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.
In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a “moral ayatollah,” as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.
Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn — between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.History will look at Bush’s 2001 speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end up.
So here’s part of Bush’s speech from 2001:
As I thought through this issue, I kept returning to two fundamental questions: First, are these frozen embryos human life, and therefore, something precious to be protected? And second, if they’re going to be destroyed anyway, shouldn’t they be used for a greater good, for research that has the potential to save and improve other lives?
I’ve asked those questions and others of scientists, scholars, bioethicists, religious leaders, doctors, researchers, members of Congress, my Cabinet, and my friends. I have read heartfelt letters from many Americans. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, prayer and considerable reflection. And I have found widespread disagreement.
On the first issue, are these embryos human life — well, one researcher told me he believes this five-day-old cluster of cells is not an embryo, not yet an individual, but a pre-embryo. He argued that it has the potential for life, but it is not a life because it cannot develop on its own.
An ethicist dismissed that as a callous attempt at rationalization. Make no mistake, he told me, that cluster of cells is the same way you and I, and all the rest of us, started our lives. One goes with a heavy heart if we use these, he said, because we are dealing with the seeds of the next generation.
And to the other crucial question, if these are going to be destroyed anyway, why not use them for good purpose — I also found different answers. Many argue these embryos are byproducts of a process that helps create life, and we should allow couples to donate them to science so they can be used for good purpose instead of wasting their potential. Others will argue there’s no such thing as excess life, and the fact that a living being is going to die does not justify experimenting on it or exploiting it as a natural resource.
At its core, this issue forces us to confront fundamental questions about the beginnings of life and the ends of science. It lies at a difficult moral intersection, juxtaposing the need to protect life in all its phases with the prospect of saving and improving life in all its stages.
Bush was right. On this issue, three cheers for the president.
I wonder if John Edwards will admit that he was wrong (from Dr. Krauthammer again):
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I’ve known better than to believe the hype — and have tried in my own counseling of people with new spinal cord injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this advice have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.
Hubbard posted this at 1:47 PM EST on Friday, November 30th, 2007 as George Bush Rules!, Kraut-hammered, Science & Evolution
Since we all know everything is his fault.
Jamie posted this at 1:11 PM EST on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 as George Bush Rules!, It's Economics - Stupid!
The president met with the Dalai Lama, provoking this comment from a communist hack:
Zhang Qingli, Tibet’s Communist Party boss, confirmed Mrs. Perino’s suspicions.
“We are furious,” Mr. Qingli told reporters in China. “If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world.”
No, there’s just no justice or good people amongst the Chinese Communists.
Bush has done something right, made a good start. Maybe he’ll make a habit of it.
Hubbard posted this at 10:52 AM EDT on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 as Commie Recrudescence, George Bush Rules!
Osama’s new tape is out. Apparently if we all convert to Islam the attacks will stop. Well, golly Mr. Bin Landen, sir, why didn’t we think of that before!
My favorite bits:
the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes…
I invite you to embrace Islam…There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.
Apparently Bin Laden is now attempting to appeal to Supply Siders – this strategy is not without merit since many Supply Siders are also very religiously conservative – I keed, I keed.
Also – what the hell do real estate mortgages and global warming have to do with Islam? I mean if we really want to get down to the basics global warming is allegedly fueled by oil usage, which comes from where? That’s right, the Islamic World. And the recent sub-prime mess? What Allah would have stepped in and given 30 pieces of silver to each borrower to stave off foreclosure? Give me a break.
He goes on to call Noam Chomsky “among one of the most capable of those from your own side,”
Not that anyone really questioned whether or not Chomsky was an America hating ignoramus – but being praised by the biggest America hating ignoramus of all time must give him more street cred no?
“It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations.”
There it is folks – the Bin Laden doctrine spelled out in black and white. What strikes me right off is – it is the exact opposite of the Bush Doctrine. Spread fascism and religion in order to destroy secular democracy. As much as I fault George Bush for his screw-ups, and there have been many, he did seem to understand the fundamental struggle of our time. If only he had the ability to execute his vision with any sort of competence.
It is further striking that the Jihadi’s are parroting the exact language of the America hating left – blame everything on corporations. I’m not saying that the left wants us to slouch into Islamo-Fascism – but the similarities are too striking to dismiss.
Jamie posted this at 6:13 PM EDT on Friday, September 7th, 2007 as Another Great Victory For Jihad, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!, Global War on Terror
While many commentators see the roots of the Bush administration’s understanding of the powers of the President of the United States as something that has developed out of the theory of the Unitary Executive and the writings of such legal scholars as John Yoo, I believe that people have so far failed to identify the key thinker behind George W. Bush’s interpretation of the Constitution.
I, however, have not failed. Behold: the scholar whose philosophy has formed the backbone of this administration.
Geoff posted this at 2:19 PM EDT on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 as George Bush Rules!, Philosophy, Politics
We won. On both of them.
Dear Mr. President:
And go to hell.
Your former friend,
Apollo
Apollo posted this at 11:30 AM EDT on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 as Conservatism, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!