Without Comment

Conservatives

In the comments to that last post Jack and I were talking about whether or not the two Bushes were true conservatives. I made the observation that a great deal of the rightish political apparatus (pundits, public intellectuals (they aren't the same!), politicos, entertainers, etc) had signed off one way or another on almost everything W had done, at least until 2006. As soon as I finished writing that I turned to Andrew Sullivan and found this under the title "What Bruce Bartlett said years ago:"

But Grover Norquist takes until now to say it:

“Perhaps Mr. Bush has, on behalf of the modern Republican party, raised the white flag in surrender to bigger government.”

Too late, Grover. Far too late. And Bartlett was ostracized for telling the truth.

That's about what I had in mind.

Why I won't be upset if McCain wins

Essentially, the reaction against Bush and Bushism has set in. Nothing can turn it back. I would much prefer a Democratic victory because I think it will take that to bore down deep enough into the Federal Bureaucracy and ferret out the political hacks and incompetents who have infested it since Bush entered office. It was at its most obvious with Gonzo at the Justice Department and his string of third rate lawyers from a fourth ranked law school, but other departments have had their problems. And, there are always the clowns at the American Embassy in Hanoi who decided to split up 26 American families and make their lives hell so they could score an ideological point against the Vietnamese government.

So it is a pleasant surprise to find this in an old issue of the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson.

McCain's whole campaign is anti-Rovian. His core supporters are Republican moderates and Republican-inclined independents, and then he picks off enough conservatives to prevail. Even if he didn't have a history of rocky relations with various right-wing leaders, the very trajectory of his campaign would pose a threat to the conservative movement, notwithstanding that McCain is philosophically an heir to Barry Goldwater.

Bush has been his own nemesis and now he finds himself publicly embracing the Un-Bush, a man he repeatedly insulted and smeared in his own run for the presidency. I think that Meyerson is right in the major thrust of his argument:

With his preemptive war and seemingly permanent occupation in Iraq, and his attempt to privatize Social Security, George W. Bush pushed American conservatism past the point where the American people were willing to go -- pushed them, in fact, to the point where they recoiled at the conservative project. And with that, American conservatism shuddered to a halt. In the 2005-06 congressional session, Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress, yet they introduced no major legislation.

This exhaustion of conservatism has been apparent all along in the Republican presidential contest, where the chief point of agreement among the leading candidates has been to make permanent both the Bush tax cuts for the rich and our occupation of Iraq. The conservative agenda has been winnowed down to supporting what remains of Bushism. That's not only a losing formula for November, it also means that intellectually, conservatism is running on empty.

So - I suppose that William F. Buckley really is gone, and if it is McCain in November, I can live with that.

but I don't think it will be.

Coalition of the Exiting

Last week our illustrious Decider-in-Chief said "We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq and the many others who are helping that young democracy. "

36 nations? That seems like a lot to have 'troops on the ground.'

After all, the guy from Canada left months ago.

And the guy from Iceland is leaving 1 October. And he isn't really a soldier. Iceland doesn't have a military. He's a media rep for the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit.

And no, I am not making any of this up for effect. Ti's true.

Medieval Times

No, that's not a newspaper, though it ought to be. Here's a quote from Joe Klein in Time Magazine that I wrote down months ago on a slip of paper. Found the slip of paper.

The House of Bush is a more elaborate feudal operation. There is a medieval quality to eternal advisers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice. You can picture them in velvet robes, whispering in the prince's ear, in a 15th century Venetian tableau. Their loyalty to the family is impeccable, which is what matters most to the Prince - more than the national interest, in some cases.

This is giving Medieval a bad rap - you will notice that his Venetian example is Renaissance if not Early Modern.

Good questions

Maureen Dowd is not one of my favorite commentators not because she is too liberal but because I have watched her flirt inanely with Charlie Rose once too often. Nevertheless she asks a good question today:

“Can we please get someone in charge who will stop whining that bin Laden is hiding in ‘harsh terrain,’ hunt him down and blast him forward to the Stone Age.?’

But she quotes one of El Prez’ own advisors about George’s obsession with having the Secret Service perfect his bike trails:

“What kind of male obsesses over his bike riding time, other than Lance Armstrong or a 12-year-old boy?’

Wish I had an answer to either one of these.


This post was written on my Neo word processor in a coffee shop this morning. I transferred it to my desktop and then to Sententiae. The first time I have used the Neo this way.

The "Decider" can't decide who decided

Or at least that seems to be the case for El Prez and the disbanding of the Iraqi army, now regarded as the single greatest blunder of the American occupation of Iraq. In an interview with biographer Robert Draper reported by the NYT Bush said “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president.” That's reassuring - it shows El Prez taking full responsibility for his policies, right or wrong. The "buck stops here" sort of attitude Americans like so much.

Then the effect is destroyed by this:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Keeping the army intact was the policy, but someone decided on their own to break that policy, and Bush "can't remember?" I have to admit that I have become inured to tales of the Bush admin's incompetancy but this set me back on my heels. I don't know much about administration, but I am pretty sure that if any subordinate of mine directly contravened my stated policy I would have his head on a platter.

And I would remember it.

Invasion of the (Republican) Body Snatchers

Years ago I was driving from Wisconsin back to Minneapolis with a psych major from the University of Minnesota. We were listening to a press conference Q & A of Pres. Reagan. Suddenly the budding young psychologist ticks off three or four characteristics we are hearing in Reagan's speech patterns and says "Those are all indications of ... " and she names some disease of the brain with an odd German sound that I had never heard of. We all know how soon after Reagan left office we heard the news that he had Alzeimers.

So I am fascinated by the changes in personality that some see in both our Prez and Vice Prez. Something clearly has happened, but what? Several people who once worked with Cheney say that they no longer know him. Of course events like 9/11 (and the experience of having to order a civilian airliner to be shot down) can change a persons view of the world and perhaps that is all that happened.

And then there is George II. Ignore the political bias in this little clip and you can still be dumbfounded by the change in his speech patterns and general demeanor. I honestly don't have a clue as to what has happened to the man, but something has, however innocuous. Somedays I make no sense whatsoever, so perhaps it is simply the normal effects of age, but I doubt it (since this has always been true of me, alas). Lingering effects of alcoholism? Something else?

Or are we making too much of this? But it has always been very odd, and a bit disturbing.