George W. Bush Ends as a Disaster

John Podhoretz is not one of my favorite righties, but his New York Post piece today outlines some of the vast obstacles that must be overcome because of GWB's catastrophic miscalculations. First, his last thoughts:

Conservatives will be arguing over the meaning of the defeat and how to change things for the better. But we need to understand a key aspect of the defeat - a cultural aspect.

For decades, Americans whose lives did not revolve around politics believed that Democrats were trying to use politics to revise the rules of society - to force America to "evolve" in a Left-liberal direction.

They didn't like the bossiness implied by this attitude and they were appalled by the unintended consequences of the changes instituted by left-liberals, mainly when it came to confiscatory tax policy and the refusal to maintain social order and safe streets. These consequences were marks of profound incompetence in the management of the country, and the Democrats were punished for it.

But over in the past few years, Americans began to get the sense that Republicans had become the party of social revision - that it had allowed its own ideological predilections to run riot and that a new form of political correctness had overtaken the party that had seemed more sensible and more in line with their way of thinking.

And, of course, there was and is Iraq. On all sides, partisans are trying to make the case that the election didn't revolve around Iraq. But it did, at least in this sense: Can anyone doubt that if we had won in Iraq in 2005, Republicans would have strengthened their hold on Congress in 2006 rather than losing both Houses? That voters would have rewarded the party of George W. Bush rather than delivering the "thumpin'" of a lifetime?

I agree with Podhoretz that Iraq was the tipping point. Could this have been avoided? Probably not.

But George W. Bush spent the last two weeks incessantly following the Democrat playbook---the Dems were feverish about keeping Iraq front and center in the final weeks of the campaign. Emanuel was losing sleep, according to the fawning MSM media, over the fact that some Dems were straying from the Iraq game-plan.

What did super-brain George W. do? Did he tout a record economy with the highest Dow and the lowest unemployment in decades? Did he note US GDP rising 21% in the last five years, according to Financial Times statistics? Did he incessantly and ceaselessly point out the absolute-zero number of terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11?The answer to the questions above is, no.

Instead, GWB time after time exhorted his voting base about Iraq. Every nite, the broadcast and cable TV news had him red-faced ranting about Iraq. Why did he play directly into Rahm Emanuel and the DNC's one area that they publicly and openly said had to be stressed and obsessed over publicly for them to get a large electoral victory? And why didn't he fire Rumsfeld a couple of months before the final laps of the election campaign?

Inquiring minds would love to know, but the answer is clear. John Kerry may have had lower grades than GWBush at Yale. But Kerry wasn't that much dumber on the campaign trail. George W. Bush did everything wrong in the final months of this election campaign. And he can repent for the next two years as his only refuge will be his veto power. We are stuck with the duck, the lamest duck in living memory---unless the feckless Carter and his Rose-Garden strategy are recalled [he was so stupid that he did this while not a lame duck], and Jimmy Carter is the only president in my lifetime dumber than George W. Bush.