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Kathianne said:I thought this a good time to highlight this again:
"Bush may be getting a fight anyway. And while he can laugh off the Angry Left, which would never support him no matter what he did, the Angry Right is a force he'd be a fool to misunderestimate" - James Taranto
My feeling is that GW has been more 'compassionate' than his backers thought he would be. We expected the 'conservative' part to drive the compassion, not the other way around.
On the other hand, IF he kept up the pressure on WOT, he would keep the backing. Problem is, focus has been lost to a degree that is now becoming problematic. He got too caught up on the hurricane and such.
Kathianne said:I thought this a good time to highlight this again:
"Bush may be getting a fight anyway. And while he can laugh off the Angry Left, which would never support him no matter what he did, the Angry Right is a force he'd be a fool to misunderestimate" - James Taranto
My feeling is that GW has been more 'compassionate' than his backers thought he would be. We expected the 'conservative' part to drive the compassion, not the other way around.
On the other hand, IF he kept up the pressure on WOT, he would keep the backing. Problem is, focus has been lost to a degree that is now becoming problematic. He got too caught up on the hurricane and such.
Miers Withdrawal
Gives Bush
Chance to Fight
What matters now is maintaining support for the war on terror.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, October 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Here's my guess why the President pulled Harriet. It was past midnight. In the wee a.m. hours Wednesday the President was up past his bedtime. The First Lady was asleep. He had just watched the Astros go down three-zip to the White Sox, and he says to himself: "Bad karma." And he pulled her.
That's all the explanation I need. George Bush's opponents, on the left and on the right, have wanted to shove his presidency into a hole for a long time. Their chance was at hand. He just took it away from them. No matter which of two briefcases Patrick Fitzgerald brings to work today, it's time for this presidency to go back to work.
Last week here we were plotting the Bush revival. For the record, if he signs on to an across-the-board spending sequester, I will do dinner for 62,040,606, the number that popularly voted for fiscal rectitude in 2004. More important than that, however, was the distinction embedded in that advice-to-the-Rovelorn column: "A Supreme Court nomination, however important, is a political obligation. Iraq is a moral obligation." With 2,000 U.S. dead in Iraq, that idea holds. Iraq transcends everything. This is the 9/11 presidency.
September 11 happened less than eight months after George Bush took the oath of office. Loaded airliners flew into two 110-floor office buildings in lower Manhattan, into the Pentagon, and the last crashed into a Pennsylvania field--all within 80 minutes and with the whole world bearing witness on TV in real time to the fall of the second tower.
One may at least imagine what the course and content of the Bush presidency might have been had this not happened. Looking back over Mr. Bush's Inaugural Address of January 2001, one suspects the president would have spent more time on his belief that "some needs and hurts are so deep they will only respond to a mentor's touch or a pastor's prayer." He might have had more time to think through the policy details of his promise that, "We will reform Social Security."
In that speech, you also find this: "America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations." That raging sea rose again and washed over America on September 11. The post 9/11 world of an Islamic terror network manifestly willing to do the heretofore unthinkable took the Bush presidency, no matter its founder's original intent in January 2001, to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Bush Doctrine and now the brink of indictments related to early policy disputes over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
That in turn has led to a vigorous debate about the rightness of the Iraq initiative and the broader U.S. role in the world. This is an appropriate, sometimes rough-and-tumble debate. At this juncture in the post-9/11 world, however, nothing should more occupy the remainder of Mr. Bush's term, including preoccupations with Supreme Court nominations, than stopping from happening to him what happened to the war presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
The erosion of domestic political support for the Vietnam War was an opposition strategy, a movement, and its success ensured the loss for a generation of America's self-confidence in its military capacity and moral authority. More specifically, it legitimized an American strategy of withdrawal from its commitments, a three-piece-suit version of cut-and-run.
The possibility of Rove and Libby indictments comes the same week that the Iraq War crossed an arbitrary threshold of 2,000 dead--jack-hammered home Wednesday by the New York Times' publication of 995 thumbnail photographs of killed soldiers, portentously titled "The Roster of the Dead." We may assume this was not meant to rally the homefront. The Times' effort to cut its reporter Judith Miller from the herd last Sunday is best understood as reflecting its apparent belief that her WMD stories alone--which is to say the authority of the New York Times alone--permitted the entire Iraq war to happen, smudging the paper's bright and shining legacy of exposing lies in war.
Without doubt, the decision to liberate Iraq by military means put great and unpredictable forces in motion--not merely the jihadists swarming to Iraq to fight America's troops, but also the U.S. and European policy establishments that were in opposition to the Bush-Rice-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz worldview before 9/11.
The only Vietnam analogy appropriate to Iraq is that this opposition's efforts to promote a withdrawal (today euphemized as a "troop draw-down") persists in the middle of a U.S. commitment--even as 2,000 U.S. soldiers die attempting to make that commitment succeed, as millions of Muslims protected by these Americans braved death to vote in Iraq's January election, braved death to write a constitution, braved death to affirm that constitution in a vote this month and now prepare for Dec. 15 elections to form a parliament.
One may legitimately argue that all this has been a "mistake." It is less easy to see what this administration's constant opposition expects would become of these troops and these Iraqis after it had used the Plame affair to push Messrs. Rove, Libby, Cheney and with them the Bush presidency over the cliff.
Nothing is more important than that President Bush preserve sufficient standing with the public to see this commitment through. The Miers nomination threatened that standing, and its withdrawal restores the conservative political support he will need to defend him against daily opposition to his 9/11 presidency.
Still, there is a lesson from the Miers nomination relevant to whether the president succeeds in Iraq and with the policy beneath it. His government has to do a better job of communicating the necessity and the substance of this action. The troops deserve better on this score. Just as the Miers nomination was a mystery and was allowed to remain a mystery, the war in Iraq most of the time has been allowed to drift through the mind of the American public on not much more than al-Zarqawi's news budget for the Western media. Just as the Miers nomination failed because of inadequate explanation, Iraq too may falter for the same reason. It should not.
