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What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.
Peggy is being too kind. GWB has the lack of depth and perspective a C-student at Yale who never cracked a book might be expected to have. Although his reasons for invading Iraq were not ironclad, we gave him the benefit of the doubt. But he devolved the peace after the war into the hands of a total arrogant incompetant named Rumsfeld, who grabbed the development of democracy from seasoned professionals like Jay Garner and his team, and gave it to a loyalist hack named Bremer. And GWB was somnambulent as Ken Lay was at Enron, allowing "experts" like Cheney and Rumsfeld to overrule Shinseki and do a peace on the cheap. Of course, it was new wine into old wineskins and the seams broke.
Peggy does a somber sum-up that reflects my own misgivings---especially about Poppy Bush and his singular insouciance about taxes and the economy. His son squandered trillions with a Republican Senate resembling Ali Baba and his forty thieves. GWB is now realizing that the Dems write the history books and is trying to salvage his reputation by serving as Teddy Kennedy's tea-boy, the same Kennedy who in '65 promised that that Immigration Law would "not allow a million immigrants a year nor change the ethnic composition of the country." both of which it eventually did.
Now REAL conservatives will have to latch onto a real Republican of the Reagan/Goldwater stripe---not transplanted Rockefeller Easterners affecting drawls and down-home cowboy charm. Like Fred Thompson. Peggy continues with a sad summary of the Bush Betrayal Family Tradition, both father and son wobbly and spineless:
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
No Giuliani palliatives for Peggy and her old-time religion:
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.
Actually, I'd vote for Rudy in a pinch, but only with a Fred Thompson or Romney as VP.
3 comments :
Rudy, Romney and Thompson are all 'electable' me thinks. (me hopes)
I, likewise, am disappointed with much of this presidency.
Just two points;
1. He is the first to act in the middle east. Only historians will be able to evaluate the success or failure. It is simply not possible to have made affairs worse than they already were, despite the shrieking from the left.
2. He has given us the best court in more than half a century. And, in the final analysis, that is the greatest impact any president has on society.
Actually, the feckless Carter did meddle in his niggling manner in the Middle East---leading to the Camp David fiasco and his own defeat by Reagan when the majority of American Jews supported Kennedy and John Anderson in an effort to derail JC. [I was John Anderson's Middle East advisor and was told his funding was 70% Jewish by the Anderson finance people.]
Then Billy Jeff almost got a deal, but George Tenet threatened to resign if Clinton pardoned Jonathan Pollard as Netanyahu demanded. Then Barak and Clinton almost had Yasser agree, but YA reflected on Sadat's fate and said no. [I was almost hired by UNWWRA to be their Gaza rep in 1999, which thank God did not happen.] The Palestinians and Hezbollah are now cat's paws of Syria and Iran, respectively.
Invading Iraq might have worked had Rumsfeld not grabbed the subsequent pacification and botched it completely with loyalist amateurs like Bremer. Gen Jay Garner might have been able to thread the needle with his armada of experts, but Bremer treated Iraq as if it were a Northern European country.
Biby Cletus
I visited India often in the '80's and '90s while with Amoco Corporation, mostly in Mumbai and Delhi. Am now reading "In Spite of the Gods" which might be on sale there in Kerala or you can order it online, I'm sure. Everyone told me that Goa and Kerala were the heavenly coast and I still remember the taste of the Pomfret, the most delicious fish I've ever eaten. Are you familiar with Pomfret?
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