Tom’s Big Picture

For most real conservatives, the presidency of George W. Bush has been a disappointment. He has three major accomplishments: 1) tax cuts, 2) decent Supreme Court justices, and 3) excellent initial response to 9/11 and prevention of another attack. While he has been much superior to Al Gore or John Kerry, many of us hoped for more from Bush, a man who seemed like “one of us” instead of just the latest lesser of two evils (this is debatable, though, as the man was born in Connecticut and lived in a Yankeefied upper crust suburb of Dallas before buying his ranch shortly after being elected President).

His tax cuts have been offset by spiraling deficits that our children will have to pay or will lead to the bankruptcy of the government. His Supreme Court picks, while decent so far, are not men with strong conservative records or scholarship (thus sending a message to talented judges to keep their mouth shut about their conservative views or they will never be appointed as a justice)- and this is forgetting the Harriet Miers debacle, where Bush tried to appoint a pro-choice mediocre-skilled crony to the nation’s highest court.

The “War on Terror” has the longest list of caveats. Bin Laden is still at large. Conservatives who once made fun of liberal attempts to use the military for “nation building” defend, with a straight face, efforts to do just that in Iraq. Saddam was our Middle-Eastern puppet dictator who ran off his leash- the rational response would have been to kill Saddam and install another puppet. Instead, we are wasting billions of dollars and hundreds of lives on an occupation trying to turn hateful people with their nasty narrow-minded little religion (with its beliefs in Sharia and female circumcision) into Jeffersonian democrats. Nobody handed America its freedom on a plate- it was bought with our own blood. When Middle Easterners want to be free, they will have to pay the same price. It cannot be paid for them.

This delusion that all peoples everywhere are yearning for Western-style liberties and democratic institutions is at the heart of Bush’s failed Iraq policy. People groups and nations tend to do what they want to do- it is arrogant to assume that we know better what they want than they do.

Of course, Bush is not entirely to blame. He is a man with a bit of a messianic complex, with a lot of stubbornness, and thus ripe for manipulation from realist conspirators. Chief among the manipulators are a group of foreign-policy agitators commonly known as the “neoconservatives”- generally, these people are New York intellectuals who were Communist radicals in the 1960’s who converted to conservatism in the 1970’s. Politically, they are at odds with true conservatives because they support every destructive policy wrought by JFK and LBJ. On foreign policy issues, however, they have successfully perverted the average American’s healthy non-interventionist instincts into the swaggering militarism we see today. They are political parasites who seek a host to do their bidding, and Bush was the perfect mark. Now, however, they are jumping ship and sticking Bush with the blame as the failure of their policies becomes manifest:

www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

In 2004, Pat Buchanan extended a olive branch to Bush from traditional conservatives- he urged conservatives to vote for Bush in hopes he would dump the neoconservative infiltrators in his second term and work for important conservative issues, like securing the borders.

Instead, Bush has stubbornly stuck to his program, pushing for more blood and treasure wasted in a Middle Eastern hellhole while supporting amnesty for illegal aliens. Bush and the Congressional Republicans continued massive deficit spending, brought federal regulation of local schools, while doing little to nothing on the issues their base cares about.

They made their bed, and tomorrow they get to lay in it.

The larger issue is why does this happen? As I will discuss in a subsequent post, the dominant ethnic group in the US is the Scots-Irish. This group’s biggest flaw is their tendency to idealize their leaders. There are a lot of people in this country who believe their president can do no wrong, and no amount of information or data will shake that belief. They take their blind faith in the leader as a token of their own virtue and the virtue of the nation. There are a lot of historical parallels for such hero-worship, but none of them are indicative of a political environment that is conducive to sustaining the republican government our forefathers gave us.

Do you think the GOP deserves to lose?

buchanan.org/blog/?p=407

I won’t vote Democrat, but I will be leaving a lot of my ballot blank tomorrow.