Category Archives: Bush

The Worst of Times

Bush, Economy, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Jihad, Liberty, Military, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

National Journal has had an aha Moment: “The 10 years since the terrorism attacks of 9/11 rank among America’s most troubled,” concludes the Journal’s Ronald Brownstein:

[George W. Bush’s] “mismanaged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapped U.S. strength and imposed costs vastly exceeding their benefits. Overstretched and in the red, America ends the decade weaker on many international dimensions than when it began… At home,… the median income is now lower than in 2001 and the number of Americans in poverty nearly one-third higher. Most incredibly, fewer Americans are working today than in September 2001—a decadelong record of decline matched since 1900 only during the 1930s. Faith in all public and private leadership is flickering.”

No doubt, it began with Bush, who was bad to the bone.

UPDATE III: Rick Perry: Bush Only Prettier (Or Palin Without the Bra)

Bush, Elections, Republicans

William N. Grigg puts Rick Perry in perspective: “Why doesn’t everybody admit that the figure known as ‘Rick Perry‘ is simply Josh Brolin’s version of George W. Bush?”

Another way I’d describe Perry: Palin without the bra.

I imagine that Perry and Sarah Palin get on well.

UPDATE I: In reply to an unruly fight talking place on my Facebook Wall between neoconservatives and libertarians:

“First of all, Michael Farris, you failed to transcribe my facebook Wall post accurately; it’s ‘Palin without a bra.’ You misquote me, even though my post is above yours, more or less. No wonder you were too slack to look over my Articles and Blog Archives for my GOP ticket proposal. I’ve spilled plenty pixels over the past two years making practical proposals that comport with my principles, but are not way out in libertarian wonderland. Finally, all of you: keep a civil tongue in your head. I’m going to remove rude posts”

UPDATE II: SB: But all you are talking about is style, not substance. What about Perry’s policies? Have you examined the political similarities between Bush and Perry? (Btw, we libertarains cheered Bush when he started out. That was b/c he too waxed fat about the evils of big government and promised a humble foreign policy.) What you say here makes one thing plain: Give him the gift of the gab and a better face than the Ewok Bush, and a Republican estalishmentarian masquerading as a conservative will win you over. Never mind his political proclivities.

UPDATE III (Aug. 16): Mrs. Greenspan to the Rescue! Posted by Christopher Manion, at LRC.COM:

So let me get this straight. NBC news opens with the taxpayer-funded ObamaBust tour. Obama blows off a Tea Party guy who doesn’t like Joe Biden calling him a terrorist, and then unctuously schools Rick Perry for calling Bernanke a potential traitor (but they never mention why. Forbidden word: Inflation).
Apparently, Perry has purloined Ron Paul’s view of the Fed. Good for him. But not for Mrs. Alan Greenspan (a.k.a. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell), who parades an Obama spokesman and establishment Hot Tubber Karl Rove as the voices of reason — how dare anyone endanger the Fed’s “independence,” Mrs. Greenspan wails. (I am not making this up.)

MORE.

Where Was Coulter On … Economic Freedoms, Asks Vox Day

Ann Coulter, Bush, Debt, Economy, Federalism, John McCain, libertarianism, Republicans

My WND colleague Vox Day wants to know “where was Miss Coulter when the McCain-Palin ticket suspended its Republican presidential campaign to help the Bush administration collude with the Democratic Senate to ram TARP down the throats of a protesting American public?”

“Cowering frauds,” writes Vox—with reference to Ann Coulter’s term for libertarians who do not want a department of marriage affairs to be added to the Federal Frankenstein in enforcing morality—“is a term that is best reserved for Republicans, who preach fiscal responsibility while repeatedly raising the debt ceiling, who talk about the importance of respecting the law while permitting Wall Street to openly violate it at will, and who claim to advocate personal freedom while staunchly supporting a futile Prohibition that saw three times more Americans arrested for drugs last year than were arrested in 1980.”

Check the WND archives for the two months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Miss Coulter was too busy cheering on the Red Faction of the bifactional ruling party in a futile attempt to elect John McCain to bother speaking out against the Republican elite’s rejection of economic reality, small government principles, the U.S. Constitution and the American people. On the other hand, WorldNetDaily’s two libertarians, Ilana Mercer and myself, wrote no less than 10 columns attacking TARP and the treacherous Bush bailouts during those two months. When viewed from this perspective, Ann Coulter calling libertarians ‘”cowardly frauds” looks rather like Anthony Weiner calling Pope Benedict XVI a perverted exhibitionist.

Revere Paul Revere the Pioneering Metallurgist

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Capitalism, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History

Our president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.

The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)

The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.

In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,

an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.

To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.