Possible New Cure For Bush Derangement Syndrome

Michael Barone helpfully reads Douglass Feith's new book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (Amazon.com, $18.45) and notices some interesting points. Here is an excerpt from the book that he posts on his blog:

Readers who have invested time and faith in the current public affairs literature may find it jarring to discover that key Administration figures—Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, myself, and others—made arguments and advocated policies that run directly counter to the positions usually associated with them. For example:

• It was the Pentagon "neocons" who continually urged the President to tone down his democracy rhetoric.

• The most powerful analysis of the downsides of going to war in Iraq came not from the State Department or the CIA, but from Donald Rumsfeld.

• The Pentagon-CIA dispute over the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship began with objections by Defense officials about the CIA's politicization of intelligence, not the other way around.

• The work of the State Department's Future of Iraq project on post-Saddam political transition was opposed not by Defense officials, but by Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.

• It was CIA officials who predicted that Iraqis would launch pro-U.S. uprisings after the start of the war.

• It was State Department officials who advocated a multiyear U.S. occupation of Iraq.

What would Bush-haters have if it were not for preconceptions? Not much, one suspects.

Bush Prepares To Pass Around Global Warming Kool-Aid

Michelle Malkin directs readers to this post by Iain Murray on The Corner on National Review:

We're hearing some very bad things about the President's likely unconditional surrender on global warming today. One senior source suggested that the last line of sound defense had been breached and that "It will be very bad." I'd imagine he will request, against all evidence from Europe that this does anything but make consumers poorer and utilities richer, a cap and trade regime for energy utilities.

This is the last straw regarding President Bush's conservatism. No one can rightly be called a conservative who supports government intervention for global warming. Heck, even if the science is solid--a dubious assertion--and the anti-warming measures will actually curb warming--significantly more dubious--what ever happened to freedom? What does "Give me liberty or give me death" mean, anyway? USA, you've come a long way.

Christian morality has played a significant part in presidential politics of the past, but it will have been nothing compared to the coming Green morality.

McCain has bought in too, and you can bet that both Democrats are in. So we likely have another eight years of this madness to deal with. This only underscores the extreme importance of electing Republicans to Congress who can stop this religious movement from destroying our economy and more importantly, our freedoms.

A Tough Act For The GOP To Follow...

(Via Powerline Blog)

Jeffrey Bell provides an interesting history and analysis of the Bush Administration; it's a very long column, but save it if you can't read it. It provides a useful historical and political context for the events of the last eight years, and speculates on the state of the Republican Party and John McCain's presidential bid.

I think the analysis is mostly dead-on. George W. Bush is a president who somehow managed to score significant political victories, but never followed through on them. The tax cuts were never made permanent, Social Security was never reformed. Faith-based initiatives were popular, but never went through. Iraq is quickly becoming a victory in the war on global jihadism, but that fact has never been articulated; meanwhile, the victories for democracy in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have seen very little follow-up and have struggled.

The Bush Doctrine of making Islamic terrorism a national security issue rather than a law enforcement issue is sound, and I believe that Iraq will turn into a victory of some significance; in the end, George W. Bush, in my opinion, will likely be seen as a generally good president. But his errors in judgment may be difficult for Republicans to deal with for the next few years.

The Secretest Administration

Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote an excellent column yesterday for The Wall Street Journal about the Bush administration's supposed historically high level of secrecy. Here's a part:

As in the Nixon era, America today is a country deeply divided over a controversial war. Today, as then, there is no shortage of disgruntled present and former government employees willing to dump secret documents into the public domain. Today, as then, these malefactors are aided by a press eager to glorify their actions.

But things have fundamentally changed in the decades that have elapsed, and for the worse. The Vietnam War documents that former Pentagon and State Department official Daniel Ellsberg provided to the New York Times in 1971, however sensitive, were all historical in nature. Not one page in the multi-volume collection of classified documents was written after 1968.

Today, the secrets that are routinely leaked to the press typically concern operational intelligence, i.e., secrets about ongoing intelligence programs. The New York Times's publication in 2006 of details of the joint CIA-Treasury program to monitor al Qaeda financial transactions is one of the most egregious cases in point. But one could cite many other damaging leaks.

The CIA's war against George W. Bush is probably the most underreported story in Washington. But who would report it, when every outlet wants to be the next one to get an exclusive story about classified information? From the bogus Plame-Wilson case to the leaks about the NSA surveillance program, the entrenched interests at the CIA have done everything they can to fight back against a president who wants the most effective intelligence-gathering organization we can get to defend our country against attack.


As Schoenfeld notes, every president has reserved the right to keep information classified, and especially during times of war. In fact, it's absolutely essential. The United States also happens to have a particularly good system of checks and balances through specially assigned intelligence courts and through Senate and House intelligence committees. And the fact is that we are in the middle of a war right now, and specifically a kind of war in which information may be the most crucial element of all.

And speaking of which, John Hinderaker at PowerLine Blog reports on the letter sent from Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Democrat Silvestre Reyes, about the NSA surveillance bill passed by the Senate; read it, it's a devastating indictment of the way House Democrats have been playing political games with our nation's security.

The Change of Audacity. Err...The Hope of Change!...Erm....

Are all these words more than just cliches to sell a book? (Ahem.) Not according to former U.S. Representative J. C. Watts, one of the all-time greats. (We'll forgive him for having been a star football player at the Oklahoma "University".)

Until we have the political courage to take on mandatory spending reforms -- which not many presidents are going to be willing to do -- there will never be change.

President Bush took a stab at reforming Social Security and got stabbed right back by Republicans and Democrats alike. So we continue to waste good money in bad models of delivery.

The number one threat to our economy in the coming century is going to be the huge government entitlement programs that will spin out of control with far greater fury than military spending. Social Security transfers money from twenty- and thirty-year olds and delivers it to the single wealthiest group of Americans: the elderly. Medicare crowds out private insurance and drives up the cost of health care by artificially reducing demand. Don't even ask about the bureaucratic mess both of these programs entail, which also costs significant cash and will only get worse as more people retire. These programs, which Rep. Watts notes are on "auto-pilot" (because entitlements are mandatory, not discretionary, spending), are the real budget busters. We need someone who will stand up against that. And Rep. Watts says we aren't getting it.

Incidentally, Watts decries conservatives who reject McCain, and on the points he brings up, he's right. McCain has certainly been good on spending and life issues. However, the global warming hoax he embraces should be an automatic no-go for serious fiscal conservatives--and the same goes for Huck--since it threatens much more serious and lasting economic damage to the United States.

The Three Trillion Dollar Congress

Mister, we could use a man like Grover Cleveland again.

That good man severely criticized the 51st Congress, derided as the Billion-Dollar Congress, for its free-spending ways and rode a wave of anti-spending dissent to re-election to the White House in 1892, despite having been defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election. The government's obscene billion-dollar budget would be approximately 6.1% of the nominal $16.4 billion GDP in 1892; the budget (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) released by President Bush today is approximately 22% of our 2007 GDP.

And now that President Bush has kept his promise to be a "compassionate" (read: extravagant with your money) conservative and Congressional Republicans so skillfully entrenched themselves by allying with K Street, a whole generation of my own personal friends thinks that the Republicans are traditionally bigger spenders than Democrats. (Despite, of course, the fact the the Republican presidential candidates are all talking about cutting spending, while the Dems are all discussing ways of increasing it. Unfortunately, for the Republicans, "all talking" is right.) And most of these guys think that the biggest budgetary problem is national defense spending!

From the article MM links to:

The 6 percent overall increase in spending for 2009 reflects a continued surge in spending on the government's huge benefit programs for the elderly - Social Security and Medicare, even with the projected five-year savings of $196 billion over five years. Those savings are achieved by freezing payments to hospitals and other health care providers. A much-smaller effort by Bush in this area last year went nowhere in Congress.

No one wants to be the person who cut benefits; that's political suicide. But continually punting it to the next administration until it simply can't be solved without disastrously painful measures? That's national suicide.

How did Mr. Cleveland try to cut spending? He "vetoed hundreds of private pension bills for American Civil War veterans." We all have things we want to spend money on, and some of them seem noble. But that's not what government is for.

This November, Cleveland won't be on the ballot, nor anyone like him. Like Reagan, his party left him; but now, so has the other party.