Thank you, George W. Bush!

Having once had the highest approval rating going back to Truman, George W. Bush left office with an appalling 34 percent approval rating – the same as Jimmy Carter. He could not attend the Republican Party’s 2008 National Convention for fear of hurting the party’s election chances.

With the recent opening of his Presidential Library, Bush’s approval rating hit a seven-year high of 47%, but that was downplayed as a trend of Americans looking on their presidents more fondly after they’ve left office. And intense disapproval of Bush’s handling of a number of issues, including the war in Iraq and the economy, remains.

When al-Qaida attacked America, only a few months into Bush’s presidency, I had just begun my freshman year of college.

One of the things I remember most from that formative period of my life is people who had voted for Al Gore saying, “Thank God George Bush is president.” As time passes, I believe that’s what people will remember.

AFTER 9/11, experts said it was “not a question of if but when” another such attack would occur. But it didn’t. That’s quite astounding for a country like the US which has so many vulnerabilities, as illustrated so recently by the Boston Marathon bombings. Given massive terror attacks around the world, organized Islamic terrorists certainly haven’t lost interest, but instead failed in their attempts to attack the US.

They failed because president Bush committed the United States to a seemingly unwinnable war which had to be waged all over the world against not only people but against an idea itself. Bush brought the fight to the enemy with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and military operations everywhere. Bank accounts were frozen. The Patriot Act was enacted. An ultimatum was issued to states that harbored, funded and tolerated terrorists that they were “either with us or against us.”

A more polite, defensive strategy of hiding behind the oceans and peeking out to launch tomahawk missiles or to conduct limited humanitarian campaigns could not have succeeded and would have emboldened the terrorists further, giving proof to their claim that America was a paper tiger. With his aggressive strategy, Bush not only reminded the world that the US is a sleeping giant enemies should think twice before awakening, but kept America safe.

President Bush also infused the War on Terror with America’s founding vision, the spread of liberty. As historian Gordon Wood has noted, in revolting against British rule, Americans saw themselves as leading a “worldwide struggle for the salvation of liberty itself.” In its global struggles of the past hundred years, America brought its vision of liberty to bear.

In declaring war on Germany, president Woodrow Wilson said America would fight to make the world “safe for democracy.”

Even before America entered World War II, FDR made America into the “great arsenal of democracy.” In winning the Cold War, Ronald Reagan led Americans to stare down the “evil empire.”

In declaring that advancing freedom would be a primary goal of the War on Terror, president Bush continued that tradition.

Believing that a region of the world which is in many ways stuck in the 7th century would embrace Anglo-American liberalism may have been overambitious, but affirming that Americans were fighting a just cause in keeping with their core principles was important for fighting the War on Terror and for how America continues to perceive itself.

As many in Israel have come to realize, a nation which is not confident of its cause will ultimately bend to pressure and make tragic mistakes. Even if it cannot rid the world of tyranny, the US is the pillar of an international order in which all nations benefit from relative stability and commerce.

If America loses the will to fight global terrorism or stand against “evil empires” or members of the “axis of evil,” the world order could crumble with disastrous consequences for us all.

In his eight years at the helm, president Bush kept America confident in its cause.

Americans may now see the Iraq War as misguided adventurism, but they still see themselves as a force for good in the world, perhaps, as their ancestors thought, the last force for good.

KEEPING WITH his world view, president Bush committed America to the cause of Israel, for which I, as an American who is now also an Israeli, am doubly thankful. I disagreed vehemently with the road map, his endorsement of the Gaza Disengagement and the Annapolis Conference, but I can’t imagine a president who believes in Israel’s cause and who views it with friendship as genuinely as Bush did.

He rejected Arafat, the terrorist. Where the Clinton administration spoke of “evenhandedness” and played the unbiased referee between its ally and the terror organization it helped empower, Bush repeated over and over, “Israel has the right to defend itself” through the toughest years of terror Israel has ever faced.

While it may be easy to view Bush’s support as the mere continuation of a process which can be traced to Johnson, Reagan or AIPAC, Bush took the “special relationship” to the next level. Reagan had been friendly to Israel but often chastised it, while Ford and Bush I had exhibited outright hostility. Bush virtually rid the Republican party of such hostility and replaced it with diehard support.

In solidifying Republican support for Israel and by the mere fact that Bush himself, an American’s American, was so supportive of Israel, a political situation was created whereby a politician’s commitment to Israel is seen as a test of that politician’s loyalty to America itself. This brick wall of American support for Israel which Bush erected no doubt shaped President Obama’s position, if not his personal views, on Israel. It has enabled the USIsrael relationship to endure despite the undeniable friction between the two countries throughout Obama’s first term.

The final act for which we owe Bush a great debt of gratitude is his execution of TARP – the bailout – by which Bush saved the American economy from complete collapse. He did so without hesitation though it earned him the scorn of many free-marketers.

The irony of Obama’s continued laying of blame on economic policies from “the eight years before I took office” is that like 9/11, the meltdown was a crisis of disastrous proportions the seeds of which were sown long before. Just as Bush ditched his “humble” foreign policy and rose to the occasion to defend us after 9/11, so too did he, in his own words, “abandon... freemarket principles” to do what was necessary when financial ruin threatened.

GEORGE W. Bush was delegitimized at every step of his presidency. From being accused of having “stolen” the election (though independent recounts have shown that Bush still would have won), to being called a racist on national television by an immature celebrity, to the claim that he lied to the American people regarding weapons of mass destruction in order to wage the Iraq War, on which, it has been said, Bush’s legacy will hinge.

“History will judge us” was the refrain Bush, Tony Blair and many conservatives had throughout the war. At the opening of his presidential library, Bush maintained that attitude, saying, “History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq....”

No WMDs were found, nor was the mission accomplished with the fall of Saddam Hussein, but perhaps the assumption that Bush will be judged mostly on the Iraq war is itself wrong. Bush was not a perfect man, but he led America in times of great crisis with moral courage. He secured America from another 9/11, he saved it from another great depression and renewed its commitment to its founding values. For all that, I believe history will judge him kindly.

Three years of Valery Plame, Eight years of "Bush Lied", and the end year when the fail of Fannie Mae and Freddie

You forget the part where Bush did not defend himself.

This is the Wall Street Journal Article in July 2010 where Karl Rove says exactly that. http://www.rove.com/articles/245

Rove writes in "My Biggest Mistake in the White House
Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country."
-- "The damage extended beyond Mr. Bush's presidency. The attacks on Mr. Bush poisoned America's political discourse. Saying the commander-in-chief intentionally lied America into war is about the most serious accusation that can be leveled at a president. The charge was false—and it opened the way for politicians in both parties to move the debate from differences over issues into ad hominem attacks.
At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his administration's heart. What Democrats started seven years ago left us less united as a nation to confront foreign challenges and overcome America's enemies

Nathan Bedford posted this years ago: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2412779/replies?c=13

Here is a post from back in April dealing with Cheney's emergence as a spokesman in defense of administration policy after the administration had been so unaccountably silent in the face of outrageous attacks by Democrats. The observation that Obama might not have won if Bush had defended his administration stands and to it I would add the observation that health care insurance reform almost certainly would not have passed because the damage in the Senate would have been far less if people like Al Franken had not been elected. The observation that Bush might be indicted, of course, does not stand but we have seen the Obama administration pursue those who interrogated the prisoners.
Here is the April reply:
Cheney Unleashed
I have long pondered the seeming incomprehensibility of the failure of the Bush administration to defend itself even as it was dying of a thousand cuts. It is not necessary here to rehearse the rope a dope strategy which brought Bush down into the depths of approval ratings and left his administration toothless.
One primary example of this inexplicable taciturnity was brought to light in a remarkable press interview of Carl Rove which I saw on CNN international . Rove commented that perhaps the biggest mistake of the Bush administration was its failure to defend itself against the mantra, "Bush lied and people died" in the wake of the failure to find WMDs in Iraq. Rove said he went to President Bush and explained to him that the slander that Bush lied was gaining coinage in the absence of the administration telling its side of the story. Who could blame the electorate? President Bush forbade Rove from campaigning in public or otherwise to defend the administration, saying that there were other more important issues and political capital should not be wasted on this issue. I believe Bush said that he would be content to have history judge the matter. Unfortunately, the rest is history.
I believe that this mindless policy is responsible in some unmeasurable way for putting the Manchurian Marxist in the White House. We know what happens to history when Marxists make it and when Marxists write it. In any event, Barak Obama is even today running against George Bush. Republicans cannot defend the record because of Bush's massive unpopularity. George Bush has left the party in a lose -lose situation.
While I was railing against this in post after post I could not understand where Dick Cheney stood in this affair. I think his role is now becoming clearer. Although always a relatively taciturn man, Dick Cheney is no pushover and he is certainly not bashful about speaking out on behalf of policies he believes in especially a policy that he so dearly believes in like national security. Cheney was clearly a dutiful vice president and felt obliged to follow the wishes of his chief executive. There is reason now to believe that Cheney considers the circumstances to have changed.
First, there was Cheney's offhand remark that he speaks to the president "occasionally" indicating that their once very intimate relationship might have cooled. I believe that it cooled dramatically in the last days of the administration when Bush rebuffed Cheney's pleas for a full pardon for Scooter Libby. Bush's passivity, indeed his pusillanimity especially during the early stages of the Valery Plame affair, stand as a morality lesson in irony for his entire administration. It is entirely possible that President Bush will be indicted because the Liberals acquired a blood taste for prosecutions that resulted in travesty done to Scooter Libby. The parallels to Katrina are also obvious.
Second, Cheney is no longer serving his commander in chief and therefore he is more free to speak out.
Thirdly, obviously Cheney is greatly exercised about what he regards to be the security lapses being committed by this administration and what Cheney yesterday acknowledged to be Obama's attempts to "socialize the American economy."
I believe Dick Cheney is a passionate patriot but one who never loses his cool. I believe he is profoundly motivated to speak out now, not in defense of the administration, but in defense of his country.

Thank you for recalling my old post. Since you opened the door, let me gallop through it and provide some posts of old which attempt to reach the essence of George Bush and to explore not just how his failure to defend his administration left Republicans vulnerable to the media and to Barack Obama but also why George Bush governed the way he did. Here is a compendium of old posts which are my best efforts to understand George W. Bush:

Here is another post which I wrote several years ago and for which I drew considerable flak at the time. I doubt I will receive much flak for the same post today:

The problem with George Bush is that he is not primarily a conservative, he is primarily a Christian, and he does not have a calculus that is congruent with yours or mine, even though both of us might be Christians. George Bush sees partisan politics as petty and ultimately meaningless. We see partisanship as the indispensable stuff of freedom. At election time the Bushes will hold their nose and dip into partisanship. But it is not in their essential nature to wage war for tactical political advantage.

George Bush wants what Bill Clinton wanted: To fashion a legacy. He does not want to be remembered as the man who cut a few percentage points from an appropriation bill but as the man who reshaped Social Security. I've come to the conclusion that the Bushes see politics as smarmy, fetid. It must be indulged in if one is to practice statesmanship but it is statesmanship alone that that is worthy as a calling.

They are honest, they are loyal, they are patrician. There would've been admired and respected if had lived among the founding fathers. But it is Laura Bush and Momma Bush who really and truly speak for the family and who tell us what they are thinking and who they are. There's not a Bush woman who does not believe in abortion. They believe in family, they live in loyalty, they believe in the tribe, but they do not believe in partisan politics.

I believe it is time for us to decide no longer to be used by the Bush family as useful idiots and instead to begin to use the Bushes as our useful idiots . I say this with the utmost admiration and respect for everything the Bushes stand for. Who would not be proud beyond description to have a father or an uncle who was among the first and youngest of naval aviators to fight in the Pacific and to be twice shot down. Not a stain or blemish of corruption or personal peccadillo has touched the family(except for the brother whom I believe was cleared of bank charges). They are the living embodiment of all that is good and noble in the American tradition.

But they are not conservative.

Thank you for the very kind words.

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.

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