Category Archives: Bush

UPDATED: Fox News-Google GOP 2012 Debate: Perry’s Bushisms (Mitt’s Manners)

Bush, Elections, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Politics, Relatives, Republicans

The debate was good; well-put together with interesting information culled from the Google meta-media. The Republican “thrust and Perry” in Tampa, Florida, earlier this month, set a good standard. You know me: I want words—textual red meat to sink my teeth into. I was worried at first that, true to character, Fox News would stick with visuals and stiff the written or pixelated word. (Here’s a slide show of the debaters! Oy!) But—hooray!— Fox came through with a rush transcript. Well-done!

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN, R-MINN had the opportunity to salvage the question Jon Huntsman flubbed in the previous, Tea-Party debate: “Out of every dollar I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?” “It’s all yours,” she replied, but we still have to send something back for the government. A contradiction, of course.

FORMER Utah Governor Jon Huntsman solidified his standing as a committed statist, having “told the New Hampshire Union Leader [that] as president [he] would subsidize the natural gas industry.” Huntsman just can’t keep his sticky fingers out of the meddling business. The industry doesn’t need help; it needs to be left alone. (The industry is currently making its case to the public via tremendous ads that explain the safeguards with respect to fracking.)

However, as in the previous debate, Huntsman managed to distill, better than the rest, a foreign-policy vision: “… as the only one on stage with any hands-on foreign policy experience, having served — having lived overseas four different times, we’re at a critical juncture in our country. We don’t have a foreign policy, and we don’t project the goodness of this country in terms of liberty, democracy, open markets, and human rights, with a weak core. And right now in this country, our core, our economy, is broken. And we don’t shine that light today. We’re 25 percent of the world’s GDP. The world is a better place when the United States is strong [I understood him to mean strong economically]. So guiding anything that we talk about from a foreign policy standpoint needs to be fixing our core. But, second of all, I believe that, you know, after 10 years of fighting the war on terror, people are ready to bring our troops home from Afghanistan, Rick.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry sounds more and more like a slightly less stupid W, which is still plenty stupid and cunning to boot.

Here Perry is losing control over the words, as W used to:

PERRY:

I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment?
Was it — was before he was before the social programs, from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against Roe v. Wade? He was for Race to the Top, he’s for Obamacare, and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.

Now that’s a Bushism. Shudder.

Garry Johnson had a good joke: “My next-door neighbor’s two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this current administration.”

Even better was Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, invoking Ronald Reagan’s lines:

“When your brother-in-law is unemployed, it’s a recession. When you’re unemployed, it’s a depression. When Jimmy Carter’s unemployed, it’s a recovery. Nothing — nothing will turn America around more than Election Night, when Barack Obama loses decisively.”

NOW, SOMEONE PRAY TELL, why do all these candidates say “Sosal Security”? In English it’s pronounced Soshial Security.”

UPDATE (Sept. 23): MITT’S MANNERS. Hours after this site singled out Perry’s pathetic Bushisms, mainstream media is doing the same. Almost a full day after the debate, Perry’s word-salad is being reluctantly reported by Fox News.

However, what other sources see as a dismal lack of command of issues of foreign affairs, Fox News described as Perry’s “show of some chops, flashing knowledge about the Haqqani Network and Indian diplomacy.”

I’m with Alan Schroeder of the HuffPo:

Yet on matters of substance, Perry remains startlingly unprepared. Asked a theoretical question about Pakistan losing control of its nuclear weapons, the governor gave an incoherent response that amounted to a pile of steaming dung. It is remarkable that a man so obviously lacking in foreign policy credentials does not make a greater effort to bone up; in this regard he is more Sarah Palin than Ronald Reagan.

Over to Schroeder again:

Romney the debater is crisp, businesslike, in command of his material, and as bloodlessly efficient as a German luxury sedan. Perry the debater is sloppy, sentimental, uncertain of his facts, and brimming with the sort of down-home folksiness that makes Republican audiences go weak in the knees.

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.