Bush is heading for the exit. I would like to say “Good riddance!” but that would not be charitable. So I will just wish him well, knowing that he and his family will forever be immune to the financial, political and immigration disasters he bequeathed to the nation. I do not at all regret voting for the man. He was and remains a better man than those dreadful absurdities Gore and Kerry.
Bush did not see himself as a leader of a conservative movement. He never even tried to put one together. He never was a believer in small government, and scarcely used his veto power to cut the growth and power of government. Conservatives could not understand when Bush supported moderate Republicans over true conservatives for senate seats and governorships. A decent man himself, he could not come to understand that the Democrat Party had no interest in helping him govern, that it was interested only in power. All else was subsidiary to that goal. Bush spoke of an “Axis of Evil” but the true evil was lodged right in the Democrat Party. Bush never got this and still does not get this.
For conservatives it has been a frustrating eight years. We had a president who never once spoke out when the Democrats slandered the military and conjured up war crimes from their fetid imaginations. He did nothing when the media committed obvious treason and worked hard to ensure an American defeat and American military deaths. Bush conceded the ground time after time to the domestic enemies of this nation. It is they who controlled the narrative during the entire war. They still do.
It about drove some of us crazy when Bush sided with the Democrats over his own supporters. We remember immigration and the Dubai ports deal when he called conservatives bigots. We remember the ridiculous “No Child Left Behind” legislation Bush cobbled together with Kennedy. We remember when Bush signed into law the clearly unconstitutional piece of work called McCain–Feingold. It is no wonder that conservatives began to stay away from the polls. It is no wonder that Republicans lost congress in 2006. It is no wonder they lost the White House. Bush brought these upon himself and upon this nation.
Even in those few areas where Bush did well—taxes and abortion—he will leave no lasting legacy. Obama will appoint at least two justices to the Supreme Court, making it impossible to overturn Roe, and the Bush tax cuts will themselves expire in 2010. It will be as if Bush had never set foot in the White House.
It is difficult not to conclude that an Obama regime would have been impossible without the Bush presidency preceding it. If someone had said in 2000 that electing Bush would result in a Chicago thug and Marxist becoming president in 2009 he would have been thought mad. But here we are.
Even as he prepares to turn out the lights of his presidency, he dabbles in bipartisan idiocy that go far to make laughable the reasons conservatives voted for him. Here is just one example of his recent gibberish.
I readily concede I chucked aside my free-market principles when I was told … the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression.
Memo to Bush: Principles are not principles if you can so readily abandon them. They are then nothing but vague notions and feelings. Imagine Reagan saying something like that. Reagan knew that principles served as guiding lights behind every action, not as mere conveniences that one could abandon at whim.
Bush does not at all comprehend what Obama is.
President George W. Bush is offering some advice to his successor, when it comes to dealing with his critics. He says in the end, Barack Obama will have to “do what he thinks is right.”…Bush said he wishes Obama “all the very best.”
Obama desires to turn the nation into a socialist dependency wholly controlled by the Democrat Party. He plans to allow sodomites in the military. He has laid out plans to enlist the entire nation in his Marxist crusade. His fanaticism toward infanticide literally knows no bounds. And Bush wishes the creature “all the very best.”
Bush is kinder to Obama than he ever was to those conservatives who placed him in office.
It has been said that part of the Bush legacy is 25 million Iraqis brought into freedom. But what of the legacy Bush has left the 300 million of his own nation? Financial collapse, a resurgent Democrat Party, the defeat of the conservative movement, a swarm of millions of illegals and an Obama presidency are the true Bush legacy.
Not even in their wildest dreams could Gore or Kerry have brought these disasters upon the nation.
Update: For a less dismal view of the Bush presidency, see here. After you read it, you might ask yourself how many of the Bush achievements noted there will survive the first months of the Obama regime. What sort of ‘legacy’ lasts but a few months after the man who built it leaves office?
Update: Here is Mark Steyn on the Bush legacy. Some gems:
Conservatives can’t complain they were misled, although many do. Governor Bush campaigned in 2000 as the GOP’s first open, out-of-the-closet federalizer of the school system and as a big softie pushover for the ever swelling ranks of the Undocumented-American community…
And:
A few weeks after the attacks, Bush had the highest approval ratings of any President in history. But he didn’t do anything with them. And the greatest mistake of all was his disinclination to take on the broader culture that, in the wake of 9/11, looked briefly vulnerable – in that moment when Americans opted for “Let’s roll!” over the desiccated Oprahfied chants of “healing” and “closure” and the rest of the awful lifeless language of emotional narcissism…
Steyn sums up Bush on a poetic note:
I doubt even with his feet up back at the ranch he reads a lot of 17th century French poets, but Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux put it well: “Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.” It was an ever bleaker and lonelier island, but George W Bush never left it.
To read Steyn is to be reminded what could have been.
Update: As is normal with him, Pat Buchanan pulls no punches.
And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a Trumanesque defiance of his critics — and a Trumanesque failure to understand what ruined his presidency.
And:
Prudence is the mark of the true conservative. Ike and Ronald Reagan had it. Neither Bush nor Truman did. And that is why the former left the country so much better off than did the latter.
The next 4 years will be worse.
7 Comments;
You sir are no gladiator nor proconsul
Just a scumsucking piece of stardust
With a bad case of penis envy
Dear Willmaster:
Not yours I hope.
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Oddly enough, the other reviled Republican president was also a social and economic liberal–Richard Nixon.
I believe Bush 43 will someday be ranked with Truman.
I must quarrel with Steyne’s island. Whatever barren real-estate it is Bush occupies never qualified as honorable.
Libby is not the first he left to dangle before our enemies, or the last.
I am struck that Baltasar Gracian saw it so clearly–
Never open the door to the least of evils, for the greater ones are right outside.
Dear Bob:
It has become common to say things like “History will show that…” I have made such predictions myself, though fewer these days. I am a rather poor Nostradamus, but an excellent Cassandra.
Many have compared Bush with Truman, especially in the way Truman lost popularity but gained it back some decades after. I would like to think so, but the clear insanity of much of the opposition toward Bush did not exist 60 years ago. That madness will also take its place in the history books. And we need to recall that much of American history is written by liberals. Truman was one himself, and a Democrat to boot. Will they be as kind to a man they see as conservative?
Truman’s legacy is clear and obvious, and mainly concerns the atomic bombs and toughness toward Stalin. Churchill wrote that “Truman saved Western Civilization.” But what has Bush accomplished in his 8 years that will prove as lasting? Liberal historians are already comparing him, not to Truman, but to Hoover.
Nixon was reviled until some years after his resignation. Then he became somewhat of an elder statesman. But you are right, he was a social and economic liberal. Today such a man would be called a RINO. He also had no idea how to fight an Asian land war. He wasted 20,000 American lives in a silly attempt to impress a few old men in the Kremlin.
Dear James:
I stumbled over that bit myself. I still do. And many folks whom I respect consider Bush honorable. Certainly he has more honor than his opponents, and we are all grateful that there were no Monicas during his tenure.
Still, I shake my head when I consider his policies toward illegal immigration. Did Bush not take an oath to “uphold and defend” the Constitution? So why did he not “uphold and defend” the southern border? How many Americans paid with their lives for Bush’s refusal to simply enforce the law? How does such a refusal square with any definition of ‘honorable’?
Is it ‘honorable’ to push for the rapid nationalization of the American economy? In what way? That was clearly an assault upon liberty, although Bush and his type will be immune to its effects. How ‘honorable’ is it to take the wealth of the productive and give it to wastrels and the slothful?
As I have written, the presidency of Bush already seems scarcely to have happened. Most of what he accomplished is already being dismantled, and rather quickly. Perhaps people will say one day, “Bush? Wasn’t he that guy who came before Obama?” And that will be that.
For being a Christian Bush did not seem to understand the mentality of Evil—something that is almost a necessary condition to claiming the friendship of Christ. He once talked of “the Axis of Evil” yet most of that is still around while Bush is headed for unemployment.
I dabbled somewhat in college in the writers of the Siglo de Oro, especially those who wrote picaresque novellas. I had never encountered Gracian, but will add his El Criticón to my Amazon wish list. Gracian is right about the nature of Evil. When a man allows the little ones to entice him—what Catholics call ‘venial sins’—he becomes morally weakened to the point where, eventually, greater evils—‘mortal sins’—can rush in. Without repentance, the man is doomed.
Nations as well.