Posted on 10/26/2005 10:17:22 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
October 26, 2005
Bush Has Been a Moderate All Along
By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
SAN DIEGO -- Now that the neocons seem to be growing disenchanted with President Bush for not being conservative enough to suit them, I can't help but be amused.
That's what I like about Bush -- the fact that he doesn't fit neatly into an ideological box.
I also can't help but think of the story of the woman who complains that her husband won't change -- won't take out the trash, do the dishes, or stop watching football on Sunday afternoons. The husband doesn't understand why his wife is upset. After all, he has always been this way. He was this way when she met him, and she married him anyway. So why is she angry now?
It's the same thing here. I wonder why so many hard-right conservatives are suddenly furious at Bush when they supported him in two presidential elections. Some point to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court as evidence that the president takes lightly the need to have on the court an ideological warrior. Others go further and suggest the president is straying from conservative principles. Yet this assumes that Bush ever adhered to those principles to begin with. And that's not so.
About a year ago, I wrote a column in which I described Bush as a moderate, and a lot of Democrats wrote back and suggested it was a joke. Now there aren't many Republicans who are laughing.
Bush is the same person he has been since he ran for Texas governor in 1994. What you see is what you get. He doesn't spend a lot of time reinventing or repackaging himself. In fact, he prides himself on not changing his ways. What was it that he promised Republican senators about Miers? That she won't change. You see, for Bush, that's high praise.
Speaking of Miers, her nomination is the big reason that Bush is taking fire from the right. But it isn't the only reason. Many hard-line conservatives have never felt confident that Bush was one of them. Because of his positions on a host of issues -- from increasing government spending to making diversity a priority in Cabinet appointments to promising amnesty to illegal immigrants to increasing funding for public housing to urging that the Supreme Court preserve the ability of the University of Michigan to take the race of applicants into account even while opposing quotas and outright racial preferences -- many Republicans have long been suspicious of the man they have chosen to lead them.
Now failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork writes in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal that ``this George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values.''
But why is that a surprise to Bork? Over all these years, where Bush stood wasn't exactly a secret. He was in the middle of the road.
While governor of Texas, he shooed away folks who were proposing a ballot initiative -- modeled after California's Proposition 187 -- that would have denied benefits to illegal immigrants. He displayed a detectable lack of enthusiasm for school vouchers. He avoided making an issue out of abortion. And he declared that bilingual education programs that worked were worth keeping. He also partnered with Democrats in the Texas Legislature, and shared credit for legislative victories with members of the opposing party.
Now conservatives worry that Bush isn't a real conservative, or at least someone who is driven by conservative principles.
Nah, you think?
Here's the real story. Despite his record in Texas and the record he later accumulated during the first term as president, Republicans kept Bush as the leader of their party.
They did so for the same reason that former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown supported a Democratic governor from Arkansas in 1992, despite concerns that the candidate was too conservative. For Brown, it was all about being practical. ``I'm tired of losing,'' he said at the time. ``I just want to win.'' Bill Clinton was seen as a winner, and so Brown backed him.
For conservatives, the seeds of their discontent were planted in the Republican primaries of the 2000 election. Back then, with much of the GOP establishment lined up behind him, Bush looked like a winner. And so many Republicans threw their support to him. Whether or not he was conservative enough didn't seem to matter at the time, nor did it matter in 2004 when he ran for re-election. All that mattered was that he could win.
Conservatives might not like where they've arrived, but they should at least accept the fact that getting here was no accident.
That type of mentality led to many misguided souls deserting GHWB and voting for Perot. Are you glad that Darth Vader Ginsberg and Steve "Foreign Law" Breyer are on SCOTUS?
"The fact remains, we're still not sure who was to blame for the Marine barracks bombing."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1449535/posts
1983, Oct 23
"Beirut, Lebanon A truck drove to HQ, U.S. Marines. The driver gunned his engine, crashed through a barbed-wire fence, passed between two sentry posts, crashed through a gate, and barreled into the lobby. The Marine sentries did not have loaded weapons and were unable to shoot the driver. (According to one Marine, the driver was smiling as he sped past him.) The suicide bomber detonated his truck. The force collapsed the four-story cinder-block building.About 20 seconds later, an identical attack occurred on the French paratroop barracks. ***It was the deadliest single-day death toll for the American military since World War II.*** 299 Dead
Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, were responsible."
299 Dead
Interesting. Ping for later reading.
LSM hype is all. Thank you my brother Conservative, for your well wishes. BTW, dim and Pubbies alike have praised President Bush in our State and local media. Hard to get past the traitors in the LSM.
LLS
And RR would be sitting there shaking his head in grim amusement, and saying: "What did I tell you? There they go again!"
<<<<
Conservative brethern..ask yourself..what has he done for conservatives in the last 3 years???
>>>>
Lets be fair to him. He tried and some of the show stoppers were not his fault but the fault of those in Congress who were supposed to support him.
Some key victories :
1) Tax cuts
2) Partial Birth abortion ban
3) Marriage Defense referendum passed everywhere.
4) Good to great judges on various courts in our country.
5) Approval of ANWR drilling in Alaska
Of course in the war on terror and foreign policy, I would say that on the net, he has been OUTSTANDING.
Some desired goals we could have met, which he fought for but could not win because of the spinelesness of his Congressional allies :
1) Social Security Reform/Privatization
2) Tax Simplification
Add your own pet conservative cause here....
Some defeats however were CLEARLY HIS FAULT.
1) McCain-Feingold assault on free speech <--- he could have vetoed, he did not.
2) Spending spending spending <--- Did you ever see Dubya veto anything ?
3) Steel tarrifs
4) Coddling with Ted Kennedy on Education ( spending has increased close to 100% since 2000 with little to show for it ).
5) And now --- the disastrous Miers nomination.
He's not all bad, but he could've been better.
As it turned out, '82 would have been a good time the take it to them. Standing firm on the tax cuts would have been a good move as well.
It is a myth that ideologically extreme candidates cannot be elected President. Look at John Kerry, a physically ugly left-wing Massachusetts limousine liberal, with a record of actively opposing the U.S. during wartime -- sure, he didn't win, but he came frighteningly close, even accruing the second-highest vote total ever for a presidential candidate.
On the other hand, Reagan was serving in an era when the communist Big Media had a monopoly on the flow of information, and he was fighting a Democratic congress. Bush has neither of these obstacles (yes, there are Democrats with an 'R' by their names in the Senate, but even that is partly Bush's doing).
I sure wish Bush had Reagan's way with words. Here's to Reagan.
Seeing how you slavishly support President Bush, why do you consider LBJ a disaster?
I support the President on judicial nominations and the WOT. I'm not happy about the excessive spending; his refusal to veto that atrocity CFR was a disgrace.
LBJ was arguably the worst wartime President we ever had. IMHO he was worse for this country than Carter or Clinton because of his gross mismanagement of Vietnam.
2000 was the McCain election. Bush qualified as conservative because he wasn't McCain. He also had a Southwestern accent and an evangelical manner which differentiated him both from his father and with McCain. That was enough to convince many that Bush was the conservative in the race. You might also add Bush's call for a "more modest" foreign policy during the campaign. That may have helped to convince many that Bush was an old-fashioned conservative.
Bush is a combination of insider and outsider. As a businessman who didn't win a political race until relatively late, he's a political "outsider." As the son of a president, who took many of his advisors from administrations his father served in, he's a classic "insider." Outsiders don't quite rise to the interests and passions of the ideologically active. Insiders tower above ideological preoccupations. So it was natural that Bush didn't quite fit in to the "movement" view of things. But then, no president will ever satisfy those who are most driven by political ideas.
Huh? I hope you were being sarcastic.
I like to think of conservatives as intelligent and thoughtful rather than your depiction of primitive losers.
Maybe you're the one who's the RINO, out of touch with the mainstream.
<<<<
LBJ was arguably the worst wartime President we ever had. IMHO he was worse for this country than Carter or Clinton because of his gross mismanagement of Vietnam.
>>>>
I might add that it was during the time of LBJ that the Great Society was born. At the time when blacks just won the Civil Right Battle and were on the cusp of following the path of self-reliance and prosperity through responsible living and work ethic, it was LBJ who pompously told their leaders that he would END ALL POVERTY by fighting a war against it.
And who would be the beneficiary of this largesse ? The black community of course. He was the one who popularized the word --- ENTITLEMENT. Ever since then, we have had people who think that government "owes" them something and that they are ENTITLED to every single goodie you can think of, to hell with responsibility.
I trace the start of rampant black illegitimacy to this time.
Since then, we have spent close to 6 trillion dollars to fight this war on poverty, all to no avail, and still the clamor to spend more to eliminate it never ends.
And it is not only me who observed this.
Black economists like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell and many black thinkers like -- Star Parker, Armstrong Williams, Mychal Massie, Niger Ennis, Larry Elder, Ward Connerly and even actor Bill Cosby have made this observation.
Thank you LBJ for helping to create this hole from which we have not dug ourselves out of.
And now of course -- Dubya is creating a new entitlement --As if Medicare isn't going bankrupt ( faster than social security ), he has now created another multi-hundred billion dollar entitlement. This time, not to the poorest, but to some of the wealthiest group of people --- Senior Citizens - via prescription drug benefits.
If you think we can get away from this one by voting the alternative, think again -- The DEMS are calling him TOO STINGY by not spending more for this entitlement.
Reminds me of my own peculiar notion of Hell ... two large rooms, one burning hot, the other freezing cold, with free and open access between the two.
And, the apparent "moderate" influence of his mother and wife have done nothing to push ahead a principled conservative philosophy.
>>>>Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut, April 18, 1983: Sixty-three people, including the CIA’s Middle East director, were killed and 120 were injured in a 400-pound suicide truck-bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
So who is it, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, or some other terrorist entity?
According to Cap Weinberger, we still don't know.
>>>>In his September 2001 FRONTLINE interview, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said the U.S. still lacks "actual knowledge of who did the bombing" of the Marine barracks.
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