The Bush Post

Here’s my general opinion of President George W. Bush:

Like him as a guy. Like him as Commander in Chief. Would love for him to keep his hands off the economy.

I’ll start with the criticisms and end with the positive.

First, Bush is not a true conservative. He’s some strange conservative/liberal hybrid. No true conservative would have increased the size of government like he has. He’s combined large tax cuts with large spending increases, and I simply don’t see how that can work. And it looks like it hasn’t. Lower taxes with a little more spending could work, but not at Bush’s scale.

In my opinion, the worst thing Bush has done is the bailouts. It’s a slap in the face to the free market and entrepreneurship. I was quite frustrated upon reading that he supported a bailout for the auto companies after Congress said no. Bailouts are a form of socialism. And I really don’t like socialism.

In economic terms, Bush is the second coming of Herbert Hoover, who made a mess by trying too hard to fix things. As I’m presently reading in Amity Shlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man, it wasn’t the stock market crash of 1929 that caused the Great Depression. The crash caused a short-term situation that likely would have rectified itself, had not Hoover intervened by imposing that pesky tariff, which got in the way of trade. Bush’s version of the tariff, essentially, is bailouts. Hoover was an engineer and used to being hands-on with solving problems. But with the economy, it’s better to let it play out on its own. (Side note: FDR essentially did larger, grander versions of Hoover’s intrusive policies, prolonging the depression, according to the book. And it’s looking like Obama will have large, grand intrusive measures as well. Heaven help us. This is why we need to learn our own history.)

Let’s move onto education. No Child Left Behind is a well intentioned idea, but it’s not for the federal government to decide what makes a local school successful. There certainly are problems to be addressed in many public schools, and I’ll dwell on that more in a future post, but let’s stick to NCLB for right now. In essence, it tells teachers precisely what they need to teach and places the emphasis on what facts and concepts must be memorized. Education should instill in children a lifelong love of learning, and to do so, it needs to teach them how to learn and why they should. Teaching to a test doesn’t cut it.

Those are my two biggest issues with Bush. I’ll move onto the positive.

Good for him for taking measures against abortion. Doctors should not be forced to participate in abortion procedures if they don’t believe it’s right. (And you’d think a "pro-choice" person would support that sort of thing, wouldn’t you?)

And now for something a bit more complicated to defend: Iraq.

It’s come to my attention that some people still believe that Bush lied. They believe he wanted to start a war in Iraq for shady, selfish purposes. Some people still say he killed soldiers with this lie. I’ll attempt to set the record straight.

Bush did not lie. He acted on faulty intelligence, which is nothing to be proud of, but the misinformation about the weapons of mass destruction was the fault of intelligence agencies, and it wasn’t exactly a far-fetched claim. And it didn’t lead us to accidentally attack an ally or a harmless neutral country. It was Saddam Hussein, for God’s sake––a threat the world is better off without. Was this the absolute best use of our military at that particular point in time? That’s debatable, but it was something that eventually needed to be done. It’s a worthy cause.

Here’s some reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801687_pf.html, http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,7766785.story, and http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.htmlhttp://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

The 9-11 Commission report is quite long, but even just skimming through some of it presents a portrait of the complicated, dangerous world in which Bush made his foreign policy decisions.

I’ve never experienced the reality of being responsible for the safety of this nation, so I can’t say what I would have done. You have to wonder, is it right to stand by and do nothing while a malevolent dictator slaughters his own people, or are we not responsible for such things? But I have to say, Iraq is much better off than it was before the war. The end result has been a free Iraq. It's not perfect, but it's free. Also see: http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/12/george-w-bush-liberator-who-saved.html

Bush’s administration has kept this country safe from terrorist attacks for over seven years now, and it’s not like terrorists haven’t tried. Though we’ll never know for certain, I might just owe my life to his administration’s decisions, as might YOU reading this and many others. It’s a great injustice that so many insist on hating him and believing him to be some villain. He does not deserve hatred. Maybe not great admiration either, but he does deserve our respect.

Also, to those who say Bush "killed" our troops––Portraying the troops as unwitting child-victims of a lying president does their honor a great disservice. Those who died did so as heroes, removing a brutal dictator and making the world a better place. Their deaths were not in vain. They understood what they were fighting for, even if others don’t.

Plus, many troops trust and respect Bush, as evidenced by:



Ultimately, I side with them––especially over folks who insist on clinging to their hatred.

I respect George W. Bush. On the whole, I’d rate him as a mediocre president, as the bad has been very bad and the good and been very good. I don’t always agree with him, but I respect the man.

Oh, and the way he handled that shoe-throwing situation, dodging and laughing it off--Classic. My respect grew.