Show Some Respect

By: Robert Farkas
submissions@inthepublicsquare.com

I think you overstate our President’s shortcomings while ignoring his successes. If you criticize the man, at least be constructive. It does none of us who consider ourselves part of the conservative movement any good to see those who should be on our side tearing down our leader. (Good or bad, this man is the ranking Republican in the land).

You almost sound like the hate-mongers on the left who in the last election swore they’d move abroad if Bush were elected. You know; the “Bush lied people died crowd?”  You titled your article “For Conservatives: Now What?” then spend the entire thing spitting on your President and offering no solutions!

I too would love to see another Ronald Reagan. I wish we had him now. Our country needs him. But he’s gone! There will never be another! I too wish that President Bush had done some things differently. It seems this reaching across the aisle talk is what everyone wants to hear. There is tremendous pressure to do so.

I vehemently agree with Reagan that there is no right or left, only up or a down. However, President Bush is no Ronald Reagan. Can we hate him for that? None of us are Reagan. I don’t know if you or I would have faired any better than President Bush has in this regard, but I could guess.

I sure didn’t support the bailout, and feel it was an awful idea, but I am not in Washington or on Wall Street, to be fair, and I don’t know how bad it was. That being said, you are unfairly blaming him for this economic mess. If he were responsible for it that would really been an example of socialism, don’t you think? A president hasn’t got direct control over the economy. However, when his administration saw this subprime lending begin to cause trouble, they submitted proposals to fix it. This was reported in the New York Times, of all places, on 9/11/03.

Those in the congress bathing in the lucre Fannie and Freddie were generating shot it down. How can you blame President Bush? He tried to fix it! You have bought Senator Obama’s lie about eight years of failed economic policy. Is you’re memory so short you can’t remember the low unemployment and economic growth that we enjoyed for six of President Bush's eight years? It really wasn’t till the last two years with the left dominating the congress that things really went in the tank. Kind of like President Clinton getting the credit for the good economy and balanced budgets that the Republicans had to force on him the last six years of his administration.

Perhaps President Bush should have written Iraq’s constitution for them. I don’t know. But I think, as I have written to you before, that the people of America would have crucified him and called him Imperialist for trying to colonize the Middle East. (Not that they don’t already.) How could he have won? As for the cost of the war, it’s 1% of GDP! How does that compare with Medicare? Welfare? Social Security? Point your finger in the correct direction, sir.

I say that the left in this country have been complete jerks to this President, the media and Hollywood as well. And I think you, sir, are being ungrateful to the man who has protected your behind for the last seven years! If you had asked anyone on 9/12/01 if they thought we’d not be attacked again, you’d have been hard pressed to find a yes. But here we are; safe and sound.

I don’t ask that he be another Reagan (we knew he wasn’t when we hired him) and I don’t ask that he be crucified like Jesus Christ by his ungrateful constituents. Give credit where it is due. His policies have resulted in over thirty attacks on our country being thwarted, did you know that? Most don’t. He doesn’t grandstand about it, just as he didn’t rush out and announce when weapons of mass destruction were found. I think it is the biggest of his blunders; he has been woefully unwilling to toot his own horn. His modesty however points to what he really is: a most honorable man. So please – a little respect.

Thank You,
Robert Farkas

In Response

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

It is true that I’m very harsh in my criticism of President Bush. That is because there has been so little criticism of our soon-to-be ex-President from the political right. The problem with most Republican conservatives is that their loyalty to party supersedes their loyalty to principle. Without coherent ideas to back our political support, loyalty is no more than an empty expression of tribalism.

Mr. Bush has governed like a Democrat. Under Mr. Bush, domestic spending increased to levels not seen since the “Great Society” programs of L.B.J. Bush’s government seized control of the financial infrastructure of the U.S. economy, putting the financial wellbeing of 300-million Americans in the hands of the Democratic controlled congress and the soon-to-be Community Organizer in Chief.  Mr. Bush’s mishandling of the “occupation” of Iraq has given us a Vietnam-style no-win-war and allowed Iraq to become an Islamic Republic. It is unfortunate, therefore, that most conservatives choose to look the other way – due to a false sense of loyalty (“good or bad, this man [Bush] is the ranking Republican in the land”). Whatever Mr. Bush’s rank, when he is wrong he is wrong. Qui Tacet Consentit - Silence Gives Consent, says the old Latin motto. My sin, I readily confess, is that I refuse to give consent.

As for our current economic calamity, I don’t specifically blame Bush. I blame the bipartisan mindset Bush shares with most Republicans in congress. You are correct to site attempts by the Bush administration to reign-in the nation’s two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unfortunately, the 2003 legislative measure to correct the dangerous actions of the two institutions failed to make it into law. This occurred while the Republicans held control of both houses of congress and had a president in the White House. In fact, that same year, Mr. Bush’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) insisted that Freddie and Fannie buy more sub-prime loans from the nation’s banks in order to prove the administration’s commitment to the bipartisan “affordable housing” policy.

According to the Washington Post:

“In 2003, the two [Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae] bought $81 billion in sub-prime securities. In 2004, they purchased $175 billion — 44 percent of the market. In 2005, they bought $169 billion, or 33 percent. In 2006, they cut back to $90 billion,
or 20 percent.”

In other words, the current financial meltdown resulted from the good-old-fashion Republican tendency to “reach across the aisle.” For me to say otherwise would be dishonest. Bush and others in his administration may have seen a mortgage meltdown coming, but they were horribly negligent in their efforts to work with a Republican-controlled congress to head-off the looming crisis. Democrats may have rolled the snowball down the hill, but Republican bipartisan inclinations allowed it to burgeon it into an avalanche.

You are correct to credit the President with keeping Americans safe at home. But domestic security only goes so far. American military and political efforts abroad are fundamental in building long-term security for our nation against further attacks at home. “It is better to fight them over there than here,” defenders of the U.S. incursion into Iraq once said. And they were right.

It was important, therefore, for the U.S. Commander in Chief not only to wage a successful military campaign to remove Saddam, but equally important was his responsibility to transform Iraq into a nation ruled, not by men, but just law. Mr. Bush thought it was enough for the people of Iraq to hold democratic elections and leave it at that. What Mr. Bush and many others failed to understand is that pure democracy, after all, is nothing more than two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. Without constitutional protections for the minority, and restraints on the governing power of the majority, Iraq descended into sectarian and tribal violence. Preventing Iraq from joining the long list of Mid-East “failed states” required a long-term U.S. policy of occupation (as in Japan and Germany after World War II). Bush refused to impose a just constitution on Iraq, allowing clerical leaders to forge a constitution based on Sharia Islamic law (as exists in neighboring Iran). Had Mr. Bush imposed a just constitution on Iraq, Democrats in congress and the confused Left may have screamed, but that would not absolve the President of his moral obligation to bring justice to the nation we toppled in that evil part of the world. Under our constitution, Mr. Bush’s “war powers” gave him near absolute power to direct Iraq’s political course. Unfortunately, for the U.S. and Iraq, he failed to do so. If (when) President Obama withdraws U.S. forces from Iraq, it will fast become another oil-rich Islamic thorn in the side of the Western World.

Loyalty is one of man’s more noble traits. But blind loyalty to an individual or party undermines the moral and political principals that form the basis for their existence. If Republicans fail to learn from criticism, labeling it disloyalty, their party will continue its precipitous downward spiral into oblivion.

--Mr. Curmudgeon