I'm not a Bush apologist. I'm ambivalent about party loyalty. I didn't vote for him in either 2000 or 2004. I voted American Independent/Constitution Party along with all the other less than 1% of Americans. Did I waste my vote? No. Presidents are elected by an electoral college. President Bush wasn't going to win California and I liked the American Independent candidates better. Who were they? 2000--Howard Philips. 2004--Michael Peroutka. Absolutely household names, huh? However, I wanted Bush to win, since I knew my guys couldn't.I was really happy with Bush's Supreme Court appointees. For all the Reagan loyalists out there, think about who he appointed. Two of the four were good. Rehnquist--good. Scalia--good. O'Connor---bad. Kennedy---bad. I recognize that the two bad Reagan Justices are better than the Clinton and Carter appointments still on the Court, but they regularly came down on the side of the liberals on very important decisions. Kennedy exemplified this recently with his opposition to the death penalty for child rapists. W's dad gave us Souter. Ouch! But Clarence Thomas too. So Bush looks angelic with his two for two, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. And they have performed very nicely in their time on the Court. By the way, who is a good justice? Someone who fulfills the Constitutional purpose of the Judicial branch, to interpret the law. They should be making their decisions based on the constitution, not making new law.
President Bush's Iraq War, especially due to the daily scathing hits he takes from the drive-by media, has his popularity rating at 23%. The media also pounced all over the Valerie Plame case with constant speculation that was all debunked by Richard Armitage confessing that he truly was the source of the leak of her identity, not Scooter Libby or Karl Rove. What they didn't jump on was the exposure of the lies by her second husband, Joseph C. Wilson, described in this National Review column. Bush has actually been fully vindicated in the Plame case, but people wouldn't even know it because the mainstream media doesn't report it. It seems that every single prisoner "abuse" issue sticks to the president like Velcro. They advertise the number killed in Iraq incessantly even though most wouldn't know that we see more murdered in California in two years than men who have died in combat in Iraq in five. At the same time, they don't eagerly pick up stories like this about Obama. Maybe it will get traction, but it would seem that the two issues that would resonate in this election would be gas prices and foreclosures. Obama doesn't want to drill and Obama may have been personally involved with corrupt mortgage brokers.
The talking point on the Iraq War has been "War of Choice." They picture President Bush as out to get revenge for the assassination attempt on his father. They paint him as tied in by greedy oil companies. Then they get started on how the war has been fought. Regarding a War of Choice, we haven't heard almost anything from people who are actually involved in the decision making on Iraq. Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, wasn't an inside participant---he reported just what he was told, even by his own words. Now someone truly credentialed is writing and it is W's Under Secretary of Defense Policy from 2001-2005, out with a new book, introducing it with a column in the Wall Street Journal, totally debunking the "War of Choice" mantra. That should be put aside permanently now. It won't because of Democratic sycophants, whom the media loves, but it should be. The White House decided it was a war of necessity. Maybe it was or maybe it wasn't, but they had to make a decision that would impact whether we could become a target of a nuclear attack. The rest is history.
Your post shows the kind of political understanding I associate with born again Christians and which is strangely missing from otherwise theologically conservative Christian sites such as, for instance, the PuritanBoard. The number of typically politically liberal members of that board is striking and shows why mainstream Presbyterian churches go liberal doctrinally.
ReplyDeleteAnd they usually justify their left-wing bias by stating that being a Christian doesn't mean you have to support right-wing cultural causes, to the detriment of preaching the gospel blah, blah, blah.
It's about being able to discern up from down.
Reagan said it: there is no left and right, there is up and down. And the left is for whatever the king of hell wants.
Thanks CT. Up and down, very good.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I agree almost completely. While the Electoral College does elect the President, I can recall only once where the popular vote was different from the Electoral College vote - Dewey v. Truman. It may have happened before in the beginning of this Republic, but I don't have the time to check.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, your vote for the Indy in CA wasn't wasted, because, like you said, CA was not going to Bush. A vote like yours would have been wasted in OH or FL. At least that is my opinion, but it's changing. I would not have voted for Romney had he won the GOP nomination. I would have looked elsewhere or written in a vote.
I am not a Bush apologist either. He isn't as evil as the DEMS make him out to be, but he has disappointed me quite a bit. His decision to go to war in Iraq, and, even more importantly, his prosecution of that war are areas in which I disagreed with the President.
His Supreme Court selections have been fantastic, and for those two decisions alone I'd rate his Presidency as a success.
Historically the casualties in Iraq are extremely low for large-scale warfare. There's no such thing as a bloodless war. And the liberal media and Democrat Party in their wickedness judged and portrayed everything on a scale of perfection from the initial invasion. Bush's problem in the running of the war was in appointing generals for their politically-correct last names (one Lebanese, one Hispanic) who were not up to the job, and who apparently didn't value doing what needed to be done to get the job done. He also didn't keep an eye on what was going on or else he would have known Rumsfeld, for all his virtues in that position, was being a problem.
ReplyDeleteBush main fault as President is his not paying attention to projects after he gets them started, and his lack of communicating with the country and doing what is necessary to counter the propaganda pouring out of the left-wing media and congress.
As for the benefit of invading Iraq and taking down the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, you have to step back and see how big that is and how far-reaching it already has been in a positive way and will be in the future. Right in the midst of the devil-controlled territories a huge shock of freedom and Christian values has been delivered, in the inevitably messy and imperfect way that can only be done, against huge forces, internal and external of devil-inspired propaganda and devil-inspired acts, still, the shock has been delivered, the positive influence is immense in ways most people who are even friendly to it all can't yet see.
^ ct's comments are interesting considering he calls the PuritanBoard full of "liberals" when in fact about half the members there are theonomists and the other half are a mixture of paleocons, Paulites, and others.
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