Um, not really.
Posted on 03/14/2012 1:06:27 PM PDT by STARWISE
TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from landlocked Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast, is a “no-brainer” that would create jobs and bolster the economy, former President George W. Bush said on Tuesday.
The $7.6 billion Keystone XL line would generate private-sector employment and government revenue, he said at an American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers conference in San Diego. The U.S. government’s budget deficit is unsustainable and must be reduced by supporting industry, Bush said.
“The clear goal ought to be how to get the private sector to grow,” said Bush, who spoke during a luncheon at the conference. “If you say that, then an issue like the Keystone pipeline becomes an easy issue.”
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
More women vote for democrats than men by far.
You can thank women for both the "bent one" and odinga.
Not FReeper women, but women in general so stick it with the broad brush.
Sigh. Here we go again. President Bush comes out and makes a statement about something everyone should all agree on. Yet, some of the haters here come out with their claws out and hijack this thread with nasty comments that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Wish some folks could direct that same vicious anger at the current occupant in the White House instead. It is a waste of time to bash the former president who spent every waking hour of his presidency protecting this country from another terrorist attack. Guess that is one of Bush’s many successful achievements his “detractors” want to overlook and forget.
BTW, thanks for the ping Star!
And the same to any others who decide to jump in to moan and complain from your BDS dark pit of negativity.
I was going to say something about the DERANGEMENT of those making the pathetic comments here, but you did it better.
THANK YOU, STARWISE!!!
(I'd feel sorry for the nutcases if they didn't bring the disease on themselves.....)
btw, President Bush is continuing to do in his post-presidency what he did during his eight years in office.......conduct himself with complete dignity and grace, care for others, serve his country, and fight for FREEDOM.
Anyone who doesn't miss this great patriot is to be pitied.
Fortunately, the vast majority of them are hardcore leftists and the few still hanging around here are hardly worth the bother....
I wouldn't advertise my ignorance, were I you. Makes you look really, really bad......
Fortunately, those of us who didn't hate him remember, and have a much different, and more accurate perspective about the tiny minority who hate President Bush.
They're not well, woofie. They're not well at all.....
Or perhaps they're in the group who thinks President Bush planned it..........wouldn't surprise me in the least if Charlie Sheen posts here. :)
“I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena,” Bush said. “He deserves my silence.”-GWBush 2009
It's what ALL good ex-Presidents do. It's how ALL good ex-Presidents behave toward their successors.
Or have you forgotten?
How could I have forgotten? I’m the one that posted the exact quote. I remembered him saying it.
Speaking of GW Bush, I thought “blood for oil” was going to get us “oil”. Where is all that cheap Iraqi gas the liberals said we were going to war over? I’m not seeing it.
Until the hate-filled, senile Jimmy Carter and the sleazy pathological liar Bill Clinton, NO ex-President has bashed his successor.
And now President Bush is being bashed here on a conservative forum for behaving as ex Presidents are supposed to act. THEY have forgotten.
Um, not really.
Hah! What a laugh. Bush crawled back to Texas and forgot all about us. He couldn't care less. He's got his portrait hanging in the White House.
“I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market." Yeah, some hero. He gave up just like Palin did. Left us with Obama. Didn't even fight for McCain.
Now he speaks up after three years of destruction and you want to fall at his feet again.
Swooning is for those who can't think for themselves. The rest of us are completely over Bush and his fellow cronies.
Ok that cleared that up....
Good Liberal ....”Bush is Bad
Real Conservative ......” Bush is Bad”
I can see the difference
You don't understand. (;> You get all types at the country club bar and you have to get along for the good of the club. Be damn unseemly for one of the founders kids to be picking on the newbs. Damn caddies got a seat on the board and slipped everybody nitrous the night of the board president election. It will all sort itself out before the great grand kids come to maturity. The caddies are bound to wreck the place but the old members will pick up the pieces.
As evidence that you have got me entirely wrong, I submit a compendium of posts published on FreeRepublic years ago :
You speak of George Bush and to this day I have ambivalent feelings about him. I have supported George Bush in many matters and have always credited him with the best of motives. I describe him as having a white heart and an empty head.
Since reading your mail I went through my old posts and found the following which sets forth my conclusions written at the time of his service to the country and without the benefit of much hindsight. I warn you that they are long which is, of course, typical for me.
Here they are:
THE CHARACTER OF GEORGE BUSH
Let me make it quite clear from the very beginning that I do not assail the virtuous character of George Bush. To the contrary, I admire it. In September 2006, I posted this:
I believe the author missunderestimates George Bush. If he acts, he will not act to protect his legacy, he will act to protect his country.
In recent weeks, no FReeper has been more harsh, even bitter in his criticism of President Bush. But I have never accused him of low or base motives. I have abandoned George Bush over Harriet Meir, spending, McCain Feingold, and the foolishness and ineptness over Valerie Plame, the ineptness over Katrina, validating Democrats by pandering to the likes of Teddy Kennedy, the need to change course in Iraq, and above all, over immigration, but I never thought that Bush was wrong because he would sell us out or because he was ambitious.
Bush will act, or not act, because he believes it is right and because he is a patriot. Unlike the author, Bush is not a neocon, his agenda is strictly America’s future.
If one considers the list of failures for which I indict George Bush in the preceding quoted paragraphs, not one of those actions that so troubled me occurred because George Bush is a small man. To the contrary, they happened because George Bush chose options congruent with his faith. They were animated out of a fullness of heart, not a meanness of character.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HARRIET MEIR
Looking back, I think the nomination of Harriet Mier was a profound disillusionment for me as it was for George Will and other conservatives. I quote a reply in the context of that nomination to demonstrate that I am not personally opposed to George Bush, to the contrary I admire his character:
[Quoting George Will:] “As for Republicans, any who vote for Meir will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch’s invaluable dignity.”
As a result of the policies of the Bush administration, Republicans have forfeited their formerly kryptonite hundred year claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility.
Thus we have wantonly kicked away one of the legs of our stool. Another leg of the stool was comprised of our ability to go to the electorate, as George Bush did successfully in the last two elections, and persuasively argue that we were the party of judicial integrity. That we were the party which manned the threshold to the Constitution like the Patriots at Thermopylae to check the ravening horde of liberals who would sack the Constitution.
The Harriet Meir nomination in a stroke has needlessly compromised our ability plausibly to appeal to the electorate as a the party which stands on constitutional principle and eschews judicial opportunism.
Why did we saw off two of our three legs? On the issue of spending some would say it is because Bush was never a conservative. Others would say that it was the war that did it but that would not be the whole truth, at least that would not be the whole explanation. Others would say that it is simply the nature of a politician to buy votes with other people’s money and the temptation, even to Republicans, is irresistible.
WHAT THE NOMINATION OF HARRIET MEIR REVEALED OF GEORGE BUSH’S CHARACTER
My own view is that our present dilemma is the product of a little bit of each of the above. For years now I’ve been posting my view the George Bush is not essentially a movement conservative but a committed Christian. Here’s what I’ve been saying recently:
“The truth is straightforward, as usual. Bush is first a committed Christian, then a devoted family man who values personal loyalty to an extreme, and third, a conservative when that philosophy does not conflict with the first two. In this appointment, Bush believes he has satisfied all three legs of the stool.
“On the limited evidence available, I do positively believe Bush appointed her because she has been reborn. I mean that quite respectfully. I mean that he is counting on her being a new person. Most of the time it means she will vote conservative. But I honestly do not think Bush appointed her to vote conservative. I think he appointed he to vote in the SPIRIT.”
The sad thing for us conservatives is to contemplate just how unnecessary the debacle over Harriet Meir really was. The whole nomination fiasco is almost uniquely unrelated to identifiable political or policy considerations. In the absence of such temporal explanations, I am left with the conclusion that Bush has selected her because she is Christian.
FAITH TRUMPS PARTY
If one accepts that Bush’s Christian character is the key to understanding the man, it explains both your support of him and his virtues and my support of him and his virtues, but also my disillusionment with him-equally because of his virtues. If George Bush gives billions of our taxpayer dollars away to fight AIDS in Africa it is a noble gesture out of the impulse of a Christian heart. If he toasts Bill Clinton in the White House and by the gesture implicitly tells the world that the entire Republican effort to impeach Clinton was misplaced, he does so out of the Christian duty to love his enemy. If he panders to Teddy Kennedy in the White House, he sees himself not as sleeping with the enemy but as turning the other cheek. If he is “compassionate” in his conservatism, he sees it as the outworking of his Christian duty to give alms. Finally, if he consigns his whole administration to disintegration as he watches his approval numbers descend into the 20s because he declined Karl Rove’s advice to defend the administration’s Iraq policy and thus wrecks his administration along with his party’s chances, he does so because as a Christian he knows he will be called to account for his actions in another venue.
If George Bush and his family think that politics is “smarmy” and that party politics are even more smarmy, it comes from his epiphany with Billy Graham which made him a new man, a man which sees another world, a larger vision. The world of party politics is grimy and transitory and not a worthy place to store up one’s treasure. It is as nothing against the overwhelming contemplation of eternity.
THE PROPER ROLE OF PARTY IN GOVERNANCE
The founders designed a government which they hoped would function entirely without parties, indeed, it is the job of parties to bridge over the obstacles to power which the founders installed as checks and balances in our Constitution. The founders called partisanship “factionalism” but whatever the label they feared parties because they saw them as another name for the mob. Parties are in business to overcome the checks and balances which frustrate their ambitions.
It is hardly politic for an essayist today to openly declare that the founder’s got something wrong but that is undeniably so when it comes to the issues of parties.
Today, no administration can effectively govern if it permits itself to be frustrated by the checks and balances in the Constitution. The degree to which the Congress will do the president’s will largely depends upon the degree to which he can exercise party discipline. George Bush was a profound failure in this respect and Republicans paid terrible forfeits in 2006 and 2008. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were able to enforce enough party cohesion to escape impeachment. George Bush simply could not, or would not, control the Rinos in his own party except perhaps on the issues of maintaining the fight in Iraq and tax cuts.
So there is always a tension, thank God, between the politics of effective government on the one hand and the constitutional rights of our citizens on the other. If we drift too far toward one party government we risk our liberty. If we drift too far from party discipline, we risk the failure of government.
All this brings us to an examination of your assertion:
First of all, all Presidents have a duty to be above party politics, Presidents represent all Americans, not just their particular party. President Bush upheld that discipline in an exemplary manner and it was good for the country.
For all the reasons I’ve expressed above, I am bound to say that I find your sentiment noble in conception but very, very naïve when it comes to application. What George Bush did was not good for the country because he put us in the mess we are in. When political scientists write the history of the election of Barak Obama they are going to write that it was lost not by John McCain’s haplessness but by George Bush. It was lost because Bush abandoned party, not the other way around as you assert, and without party the president becomes so confounded by the checks and balances put in place by our founders that he simply cannot govern effectively. If he cannot govern effectively, he cannot “represent all Americans.” No party means no president, no president means no governing for America.
Nobility of character explains George Bush but it does not excuse him or relieve us of the consequences.
THE VERDICT OF HISTORY
I truly fear that George Bush will be seen as the last president of Constitutional America. The Last president of the America you and I were born in. The last president of the superpower. The last president of the nation in an age of nation states. The last president of Old America before it was swept into transnationalism.
He will be seen as a last president of virtue. The last president to believe he was obligated to tell his people the truth as he knew it. The last to have unalloyed loyalty to the nation of his birth. The last patriotic American president.
George Bush will be known as the last president to remain faithful to the Old Constitution. The last to put country before ideology, class, tribe, party, and race.
George Bush will be seen as the last Christian president. The last keeper of the light of the shining city on the hill.“
You and I can have no more basic disagreement that over the role of party politics and the proper governing of America and the affirmative obligation which a president undertakes when he accepts the nomination of his party and gives the nation his oath at his inauguration also voluntarily assumes duties as the titular head of his party.
Self-ping to read again later. Interesting and insightful essay.
I think most of the criticism of him on this thread regards what he did (or didn’t do) as President, not as ex-President.
But please, enlighten us. What’s he been up to the last 3 years?
No. You can't. You refuse to. Bush was bad as far as conservatism goes. He wasn't a conservative.
Perhaps you were willing to accept his milk-toast administration but some of us wanted more. A LOT more. He let the nation down by constant compromise and capitulation to the dems.
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