War Party and Tea

With the surprise retirement of Evan Bayh, widely assumed to be a shoo-in for reelection, Republicans can lick their chops some more about the electoral gains they are sure to make this fall.

Perhaps the Tea Party pressure is paying off. Maybe enough of those evil Democrats are getting the picture that their big government machinations are history and a renewed, revitalized, and reformed Republican Party is poised to set the ship aright by following the Constitution and restoring the republic to the one bequeathed to us by the founding fathers.

Probably not.

Like Obama, the Republicans are misreading the early election returns.

In 2006 and 2008, Americans sick of the Republicans, their ill-conceived wars, and a miserable economy, threw the GOP and their “permanent majority” out. 2008 was a year where the Republicans were so despised that Democrats could have literally nominated a yellow dog and still won the presidency. Not sensing this, Obama and the Democrats introduced to America an agenda that envisioned a health care plan that would inevitably lead to a government take-over of the industry.

Republicans have responded by defeating Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, and of all places, Massachusetts.

So how are they misreading the election results?

They are taking these early Democratic defeats to mean that, even though the Republicans have offered no agenda of change, the American people must want back the good old days of the early 2000s of the ambiguous “War on Terror” and endless deficit spending.

No sooner had Scott Brown embarrassed his daughters on national television did National Review’s Andrew McCarthy assure us that it was the War on Terror that really motivated people to get out there by praising how:

“Scott Brown went out and made the case for enhanced interrogation, for denying terrorists the rights of criminal defendants, for detaining them without trial, and for trying them by military commission. It worked. It will work for other candidates willing to get out of their Beltway bubbles . . . .

“He said the United States needs to stop apologizing for defending itself. And he won going away, in the bluest of blue states.”

What McCarthy means by “defending itself,” is keeping the same Bush foreign policy that Americans have already repudiated.

This also shows how, despite all the good rhetoric about the Constitution, limited government, and reduced spending at home, all of that takes a back seat to the ubiquitous “War on Terror” and makes the so-called Tea Parties a farce.

Just look at the reception given to Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul.

Paul, who has consistently led in Kentucky polls for at least four months, is continually vilified by his party and their media henchmen for a variety of bizarre reasons. He’s kooky. He’s pro-abortion (untrue). He’s a marijuana advocate (a dramatic distortion). But the most telling criticism is that Rand Paul is somehow weak on military matters and wants to surrender the “War on Terror.”

To make that argument ignores the fact that Paul’s first campaign commercial declared that he will “stop travel visas from terrorist nations” and “keep prisoners off U.S. soil,” as well as supporting military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. On his website, he has expressed his support for a declaration of war on Afghanistan. He also wrangled the endorsement of war empress Sarah Palin. To the chagrin of all the little Churchills with laptops, Rand Paul is not Neville Chamberlain.

But it was Jeanette Pryor of Newsrealblog that summed up the supremacy of war when she said this regarding Sarah Palin’s endorsement:

"The logical conclusion of this endorsement is that Palin considers America’s global defense of freedom, national defense, the War on Terror, the defeat of Radical Islam, and the support of Israel and our allies, to be less important than 'some' domestic policy issues."

Pryor says plainly that not only are the wars more important than our domestics, but Israel is too. Are we for America first or are we not? Or as The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison noted about the reaction to Palin’s endorsement, she “has erred because she forgot that national security is the one area where conservatives cannot meaningfully disagree and still be accepted.”

During the Bush administration, everything took a backseat to the wars. Spending skyrocketed. The Roe v. Wade atrocity remained firmly in place. Border security was abandoned. The federal government sunk its claws deeper into American education. Executive power increased. But the wars, well, that’s what really mattered.

These GOP sycophants have already demonstrated that once the Republicans are back in power, the latter aim to do everything exactly the same once again. And the former aim to continue their bidding.

From the party that has had no ideas for fixing the problems they helped cause this should be no surprise.

Dubya's Swan Song

Now in the final hours of his administration, President George W. Bush seems to be receiving some final well-wishes, even from many of his harshest critics while his few remaining supporters seem intent on supporting him blindly while seemingly refusing to acknowledge his deficiencies. So ends the odd and sometimes insuffrable Bush years.

The failure of the administration of the 43rd president is not that he invaded Iraq, was apparently asleep at the wheel when Hurricane Katrina hit, sided with Ted Kennedy on education and immigration, flubbed his initial Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers, or grew government at LBJ speeds. It was all of this that derailed him. It was the liberalism of the first Republican president of the 21st century that caused his failure.

The conservatism embodied in Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan died during the past eight years. It was not merely that the president was liberal when we thought he was conservative, but he had legions of followers on the Right who followed him too blindly. After an election where conservatives and Republicans bemoaned the cult of personality surrounding our incoming president, we should be reminded that an idol was made out of the most recent occupant of the office. Conservatives followed a failed president off the cliff. The wreckage lies at the bottom.

Despite all that, even his biggest mistake, Iraq, is not uniquely Mr. Bush’s fault. His enablers came from both parties. Democrats and Republicans to this day continue to funnel American tax dollars into a Middle Eastern black hole.

Many people (yes, liberals) desired to see Saddam Hussein deposed but only when a humanitarian war went south did they begin to denounce it. The war of national security to remove weapons of mass destruction, that likely existed at one time, became a war of ideology (democracy) and a clash of civilizations. I have stubbornly clung to the belief that the President did not lie in making his case to the nation about the war with Iraq (in fact, I have far more contempt for the neoconservative advisors who, like they did for many others, duped the president about the threat of Hussein‘s Iraq), but regret his refusal to correct an obvious mistake.

Some of the remaining supporters of the president are taking these final hours to harangue his critics who gave him nothing but grief from the very beginning. External obstacles, by and large, did not ruin the presidency of Mr. Bush. It was mainly the ones he set for himself: Iraq, the bureaucratic nightmare of Katrina, his incompetent presiding over a corrupt party, that is what made George W. Bush a failed president and a tragic historical figure.

There is little doubt that George W. Bush’s time in office will be judged by his decision to go to war in Iraq. He will be fortunate if the economy turns around and the recession manages to avoid becoming a depression as the plummeting economy is considered by many to be the final tragic legacy Mr. Bush is leaving to his country.

It was his liberalism that ruined the president’s two terms. Even though Mr. Bush’s successor promises to be different, he appears poised to keep doing more of the same. Instead of Iraq, Mr. Obama will ratchet up the American presence in Afghanistan, a country perhaps impossible to pacify, that could ruin his presidency as the former country ruined Mr. Bush’s. The government grew at an alarming rate under this Republican president and the incoming Democratic president, with stronger majorities than his predecessor ever had, is prepared to explode the government to new and more invasive depths. Did we really learn nothing from the Bush years?

These last few days have filled me with regret. It serves little purpose now to get angry with George W. Bush. After all that has happened over the past eight years, I feel a little sorry for him. Yes, he has been a failed president, but his failure was not inevitable. If he had kept his 2000 campaign pledge of a humble foreign policy and kept his promise to get government out of the people’s way, he would have avoided some of these massive disasters.

Alas, it was not. History is not written by what could have been or what should have been, but what was, and the 43rd president was as an abject failure. Mr. Bush leaves the White House tomorrow and returns home to Texas, which is a site I believe everyone, including the president himself, is happy to see.

Goodbye, Mr. President.