Pat pretty well sums it all up here. ********************************** Architectural Failure by Patrick J. Buchanan Posted: 08/15/2007 Print This If one had to sum up the legacy of Karl Rove as political adviser to the 43rd president, it could probably be done in four words: tactical brilliance, strategic blindness. Though George Bush was not given the natural gifts of a Ronald Reagan, his victories in Texas, followed by successive victories in the presidential contests of 2000 and 2004, put him in the history books alongside Reagan, who won California and the presidency twice. None of Bush's wins were nearly so impressive as the Reagan landslides in the Golden State and the nation. But it is a testament to Rove that he and Bush never lost a statewide or national election in the four they contested from 1994 to 2004. Rove has two Super Bowl rings. How many political advisers can say as much? But if Rove's contribution to the career of George Bush will put him in the Hall of Fame, the Bush-Rove legacy for their party is worse than mixed. Rove wanted to be the architect of a new Republican majority. Instead, he and Bush presided over the loss of the Reagan Democrats and both houses of Congress. The house Nixon and Reagan built, Bush and Rove tore down, leaving rubble in its place. Rove's failure was a failure of vision. He and Bush believed the future of the party lay in adding to the Republican base the Hispanic vote, now the nation's largest minority, approaching 15 percent of the population. They went about it the wrong way. Pandering to that voting bloc, Bush stopped enforcing the immigration laws and offered amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and the businesses that hired them. Bush and Rove were going to lure the Hispanic vote away from the Democratic Party by putting illegals on a path to citizenship. But as we saw in June, when the nation rose up in rage against the Bush amnesty, the pair did indeed unite the GOP -- against themselves, and they severed themselves from the Reagan Democrats and the country. It was cynical politics, and it backfired, crippling the presidential candidacy of John McCain in the process. But even before the disastrous immigration reform bill, Bush had become a zealot of NAFTA, GATT and most-favored-nation status for China. These have left his country with the worst trade deficits in history, put the United States $2 trillion in debt to Beijing and Tokyo, cost Middle America 3 million manufacturing jobs and arrested the income rise of the middle class, as our capitalist pigs and hedge-fund hogs have happily gorged themselves at the capital gains tax trough. Bush's original idea of "compassionate conservatism" was a fine one. But under him and Rove, compassionate conservative turned out to be code for a cocktail of Great Society Liberalism and Big Government Conservatism. How could professed admirers of Ronald Reagan think that by doubling the budget of the Department of Education the tests scores of school kids would inexorably rise? Even earlier in the Bush years, the president, after the trauma of 9-11, had a Damascene conversion to neoconservatism, a neo-Wilsonian ideology and secular religion. Among its tenets: that we are a providential nation whose mission on earth is to liberate mankind and democratize the planet; that we are in a world-historic struggle between good and evil; that our triumph is to be accomplished by the robust use of American military power -- beginning with the benighted nations of the Islamic Middle East that represent an existential threat to America, democracy and Israel. Sometime between Sept. 11 and his axis-of-evil address, Bush sat down and ate of the forbidden fruit of messianic globaloney. Consuming it, he got up and committed the greatest strategic blunder in American history by ordering the invasion of a country that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us. The Bush-Rove rationale: For our survival, we had to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that we now know it did not have. The great political architects of the 20th century are FDR and Richard Nixon. After the three Republican landslides of the 1920s, FDR put together a New Deal coalition that controlled the White House for 36 years, with the exception of two terms for Gen. Eisenhower. After the rout of the Republicans in 1964, Nixon pulled together a New Majority that held the White House for 20 of 24 years, racking up two 49-state landslides for Nixon and Reagan, even as FDR had won 46 states in 1936. In his re-election bid, Bush won 31 states. In seeking a new GOP majority, Bush and Rove rejected the Nixon-Reagan model. Instead, they embraced the interventionism of Wilson, the free-trade globalism of FDR, the open-borders immigration ideas of LBJ and the budget priorities of the Great Society. It was a bridge too far for the party base. Now, Rove walks away like some subprime borrower abandoning the house on which he can no longer make the payments. The Republican Party needs a new architect. The firm of Bush & Rove was not up to the job.
Pat Buchanan, as usual, writes with intelligence and insight. I may not always agree with him but I always look forward to his take on things, and find him to be one of the very few conservative writers that aren't shrieking and howling every other word about how the evil liberals and terrorist democrats are destroying the country. He has uncommon good sense and always displays a thoughtfulness too often missing from both sides of the aisle. Besides, who else could've come up with this brilliant line... "Bush sat down and ate of the forbidden fruit of messianic globaloney."
We went to Iraq because they broke all the agreements and it was the right thing to do. The Bush white house used the immanent danger from wmd tactic because it was the only thing they could think of to get the democrats and the UN to go along with what they should have gone along with from the start. If the UN is just going to let int'l lawbreakers get away with anything, what exactly is there a UN for? Is it just to send in UN forces to have fun raping (literally) the citizens?
If you ignore the history of the last 100 years and look at the history of the world before that, you know what the number one reason people went to war with each other? I am bigger then you and I can take what you have by force. There is the joke: "Duke Ferdinand found alive, WWI a big mistake." This paradigm will continue until every country on earth has nuclear weapons. Then what will happen is what happened in the wild west of the US - everyone carried a gun and then it was obvious that everyone didn't need to have one. I see more pakistanis, more indians, more turks, more iranians, more poles, russians, koreans, chinese etc than I have ever seen in this country. The immigration laws may have been relaxed to allow Latinos to more easily enter the country and stay in the service industry, but it has equally allowed highly skilled people to work here. Both immigrants categories have allowed this country to function in untold ways. The value of your home, even the carefree life-style of americans is built on the backs of these people. I am not saying it is right or wrong. It is demand meets supply. It is probably no overstatement to say that 30% of all IT work in this country is now done by immigrants on H1Bs etc. It has boosted our economy in untold ways. Americans value Hollywood stars and sports figures, and not computer programmers or biologists etc. Why not allow people that have that desire to do so? Finally, I would venture to say that had 911 not happened, Saddam Hussein would still be be president of Iraq. It is impossible as a nation to stand by and do nothing over what is considered the greatest attack on American soil in history by a foreign people. Now be careful, I am not saying Iraq is or was right. What I am saying is that while the writer of that article states that Bush and Rove were great tacticians and lousy strategists, to me the Iraq war and the entire policy of this administration has been all about strategy and very little about tactics. Going after OBL in caves in response to 911 would have been tactics. Going after the root source of the "problem" is strategy. Again, I am not agreeing or disagreeing, I am just calling a spade a spade. Finally, I think it is funny when people try to politicize Bush. I think the guy acts 90% intuitively and doesn't think in political terms at all except when he is on TV. You think he is worried about replublican or democrat? My gawd man, he realizes he has alienated every republican in the nation!!!! Once he is off the tube he goes and does exactly what he thinks is right and doesn't worry one bit about it's political consequences. That is starring you in the face obvious. It is the job of others to view him in a political manner because when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. nitro
Your take is correct. Saddam 's financial support of Hamas suicide bombers was in clear violation of his 1991 surrender resolution with the U.N. When it comes to sanctions against the pitiful Palestinians and their supporters, the U.N. prefers to turn a deaf ear. Bush couldn't very well say to the American electorate, "we're doing it for Israel". Besides convectional wisdom was that there would in fact be WMD's in Iraq. America's worst blunder? Not even close. Hell it's not even the worst blunder of this administration. That one will belong to the expanded Medicare Bill. Buchanan does a great job (jab) with the snide innuendo suggesting that Bush resides with the other great liberal Democrat war mongers of the past, Wilson, FDR and LBJ.
No Iraq, and Bush is cruising to the end of his presidency with a 65% approval rating. Saddam Hussein and Pat Buchanan are linked in an odd way. They have been the two icebergs that ruined both Bush presidencies. Bush 41 was hugely popular after Desert Storm, but that popularity vanished when he broke his "Read my lips" anti-tax pledge. Buchanan made his life miserable by running a strong primary race against him, and ultimately Clinton was elected. Without Desert Storm, we would never have gotten into Operation Iraqi Freedom. If you believe Osama bin Ladin, there would never have been a 9/11. That was prompted by our forces being in Saudi Arabia to "liberate" Kuwait. I also find it mildly ironic that we are in Iraq to "guarantee" democracy to them or impose it upon them, take your pick, but we handed Kuwait back to the Emir without so much as a suggestion about democracy. Guess it was more important for the Iraqis than the Kuwaitis. It might have been a good time to "suggest" to Kuwait that they get out of OPEC too, but apparently the big thinkers in Bush 41's administration didn't think we had enough leverage with them to do that. After all, we had only saved their country, so who were we to expect anything in return?
I agree, I'm on the otherside on most issues but I always respect his opinions and the way he words them. If only he could be a GOP candidate, wouldn't mind that at all, even if he won. Ursa..