Posted on 04/29/2015 5:14:33 AM PDT by SJackson
Hearing former president George W. Bush speak on Saturday night at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas sent me into a nostalgic reverie. The president was in top form, speaking lucidly and compellingly about the threat from Iran and Islamic State. So this is what it’s like to hear a world leader speak about evil with moral conviction. Oh yes, I remember this.
And yes, I know, I know: president Bush made plenty of mistakes. In his speech he fessed up to a few. But he also gave the world moral direction and served as the scourge of tyrants. What a change from the double- speak of the current White House where evil is an entity to make deals with. See the latest opinion pieces on our Opinion & Blogs Facebook page
But given that our world is in such bad shape, why doesn’t the former president ever speak up? He addressed this question directly. “The office of the Presidency is more important than any particular occupant,” he said, explaining that he wanted to preserve respect for the office by not second-guessing his successor. He wanted to give him the latitude to operate without a predecessor second-guessing him.
I only partially agreed. That all works if your successor doesn’t trash you constantly. But given that President Obama has blamed president Bush for every global mishap, why would Bush just turn the other cheek and take it? Does he not realize that it’s not only him who is being attacked but also his principles? President Obama has used president Bush’s legacy to excuse doing nothing as the world goes to hell in a handbasket. “Don’t do stupid stuff,” is the essential foreign policy creed President Obama articulated at last year’s West Point commencement, by which he meant, don’t do the kinds of things president Bush did. Don’t attack other countries, even if, as in Syria, 200,000 people have been murdered by a dictator.
Don’t promote democracy, even if exporting freedom is a core American value.
Through all this president Bush has been silent. But his silence has come at a price, namely his reputation and the ideals he believes in, many of which I, too, believe in.
President Bush said at the RJC that it does not much matter, seeing as history, rather than political spin, determine a president’s true legacy. That’s probably true – but only in the long term. Right now, when the world needs a far more engaged America to keep it from becoming a jungle, it’s inaccurate. Rather, president Bush should be defending an activist foreign- policy agenda that does not allow Iran to remain nuclear and does not allow Islamist terror to run roughshod over the Middle East.
Such defense need not be articulated as a criticism of President Obama. President Bush need not trash his successor. I agree that that would be inappropriate.
But would it really be so intrusive if president Bush condemned the wholesale slaughter of innocent Arabs at the hands of Bashar Assad? Would it be seen as criticism of 44 if 43 spoke of the need to utterly destroy Islamic State (IS)? Would it be a betrayal of his successor if Bush praised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to rally the world against Iran obtaining nuclear weapons? I can only speak for myself.
I thoroughly enjoyed hearing president Bush, and also realized that I missed him. He was funny, direct, candid and utterly relaxed. He spoke with eloquence about the need for America to assert itself in world affairs lest really bad people fill the void.
Perhaps he was so relaxed because he knew he was speaking at a closed-door event, although he acknowledged that these days there is no such thing. And indeed, his comments appeared the very next day in The New York Times. Or perhaps he spoke so convincingly because he knew he was among friends. People who admired him, especially his unshakable attachment to Israel, which was another point he discussed.
Asked by his former press secretary Ari Fleischer why he was so attached to Israel, he said people were mistaken if they surmised the reason was only religious.
Yes, he was a born-again Christian. Yes, he read the Hebrew Bible daily and therefore felt knowledgeable about, and attached to, ancient Jewish history. All that of course accounted in part for his closeness to Israel. But it only a small part. The larger part, he said, was American values. Israel is a democracy. The world cannot be made safe for peace unless it becomes democratic.
Israel and the United States share core values.
Israel’s neighbors do not.
Perhaps most interesting was president Bush’s comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yes, he acknowledged, he had once said that he had peered into Putin’s eyes and had seen his soul. He explained that he had made the comment directly after speaking to Putin about his mother and her religious faith.
He said that Putin had touched him deeply with the affectionate way he described his mother.
But all that was undone, he said, by an incident that displayed Putin’s deep insecurity and his I-win-youlose mentality. After Putin met the president’s dog Barney, he commented on how small and weak the dog appeared. Later, when president Bush visited the Russian president at his dacha in Russia, Putin showed off an enormous, powerful dog. “He’s much bigger and more powerful than Barney,” Putin said.
Any man who had to show off his bigger, better dog, said Bush, had serious insecurity issues. Good thing, he continued, we were talking about dogs and not something else.
The only reason Bush looks good now is because of Obama. Odumbass is the WORST holder of the office of president in the history of the U.S. GW ranks about tenth from the bottom, IMO.
Don’t promote democracy, even if exporting freedom is a core American value.
This idea that "exporting freedom is a core American value" is idiocy. Shmuley Boteach should stick to what he does best ... ministering to Hollywood child-molester freaks, or whatever it is he does.
President Bush said at the RJC that it does not much matter, seeing as history, rather than political spin, determine a president’s true legacy.
When a key player willingly makes history via silence & AWOL, that player is complicit in that history. GW brought us a 2nd term of the Puppet with his silence. POTUS 43 & 44 will share the damnation of 'legacy'.
'History' will see to that despite the GW-lovers and Puppet-cult.
There is a psychological term that describes a person's emotional attachment to a leader despite logical reasoning to the contrary; the term escapes me...
They're all frauds.
Bush did nothing about Iran either and he had far more opportunity. He could have used Iran's support for insurgency inside Iraq as a causus belli and simply fixed it while we still had an army there. The world would have done nothing about it. Many if not most of the Iranian people would have helped. Now, with a Russian military funded by years of high oil prices, that is not such an easy option.
So he sits tight and says nothing cloaked in noblesse oblige while Rome burns, having given the Presidency to a revolutionary Marxist by the same means. The man has learned nothing.
You are absolutely correct: Your logic is sound. It wasn’t the Pentagon or the Generals that failed in Afghanistan...it was the soldiers. The government isn’t responsible for the current economic mess: It’s the consumers’ fault for not spending more money.
Likewise, it couldn’t possibly have been a lack of leadership of the opposition to the Puppet’s cult, the MSM & dems: It was all the fault of the stupid voters that swept the idiot into office not once, but TWICE.
I just wonder who it was that was in a leadership position in, as you put it, ‘the liberal republican party’ that could have rallied opposition to nip the problem in the bud and limit the damage to only 4 years.
What former president, i.e., ‘leader’, rallied the voters for the Puppet? Oh, yeah: Clinton.
What former president showed up to rally the opposition?
Got it: Former President Cheney.
/s
You are right, as JFK once said of Joe McCarthy: "He may be on to something."
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