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On Trade, War, Immigration, Bush Boneheaded To The Last

By Patrick J. Buchanan

"With his public approval where Harry Truman's stood when he left office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday.

And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a
Trumanesque defiance of his critics—and a Trumanesque failure to
understand what ruined his presidency.

He denounced protectionism, as he has with dismissive contempt since
he went to New Hampshire a decade ago. But nowhere in his defense of
free trade was there any explanation for how Middle America lost 3
million manufacturing jobs in his first term and a million more in the
last year.

Nowhere does there seem an awareness that the ideas he absorbed at his
father's knee and the Harvard Business School had resulted in the de-
industrialization of his country, an enormous and growing dependency
on Japan, China and Asia for the essentials of our national life, and,
now, for the borrowed money to pay for them.

Someone once defined tragedy as what happens when a beautiful theory
collides with a fact. And this is what has happened every time a great
empire—be it the Spanish, British or American—embraced free trade as
its salvation.

President Bush says it was freedom that prevailed when he rejected the
pleas of weak-sister Republicans and backed the surge. But what spared
us a debacle in Iraq was an infusion of 30,000 combat troops, an
uprising against the murderers of al-Qaida and a U.S. decision to buy
off the Sunni tribes, a strategy besieged empires have pursued for
centuries.

Nor does there appear in Bush's self-assurance any awareness of the
cost of his Freedom Agenda. In Iraq, it is 4,000 U.S. dead, 30,000
wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, millions of refugees, a
pogrom against an ancient Christian community, and a strategic victory
for Iran and its Shia allies across the Middle East. When last heard
from, the Ayatollah Sistani—the chief Shia cleric in Iraq, who has
welcomed Iranian but not American visitors—was calling for Muslims to
stand up against Israeli criminality in Gaza.

Like Woodrow Wilson before him, Bush appears to believe that the
nobility of his goals—expanding freedom and bringing an end to tyranny
in our world—validates and will sanctify his decisions.

Like Wilson, he is a utopian. He fails to understand that idealism has
its delusions and disasters.

The war Wilson led us into "to make the world safe for democracy" gave
us Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and 70 years of the most barbaric
empire in all history. The peace Wilson brought home led straight to
Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and a second world war far worse than
the first.

The West's road to hell has been paved with good intentions.

President Bush rightly denounces Europeans who see Israel as always
wrong. Yet he behaves as though Israel can do no wrong. Sixteen days
into the Gaza war, with the Palestinian dead and wounded near 5,000,
and a humanitarian catastrophe at hand, has our "compassionate
conservative" president uttered one word of compassion for those whose
losses outnumber the Israelis' 100 to one?

In defending his rejected immigration reform, President Bush clearly
sees himself as in the vanguard of decency, and admonishes his party
against being perceived as anti-immigrant.

But is this president oblivious to what is happening in his country
because of his and his father's failure to secure the border? Even in
rich, liberal Montgomery County, Md., one reads over the weekend that
there is a hardening of attitudes toward illegal immigration after a
spate of crimes and killings. Working-class Americans pay the price of
the idealism around the dinner table at the Crawford ranch.

In his first five years, Bush himself has admitted, 6 million aliens
were arrested at the border, breaking into this country. One in 12—
500,000—had criminal records. Is it anti-immigrant to demand a halt to
this invasion, even if it means troops on the border? Is it truly
compassionate, or an act of cravenness, to insist that the answer is
amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegals and absolution for the
businesses that hired them?

Choleric and cocky Harry Truman may be Bush's role model. But it was
Dwight D. Eisenhower who had to clean up the mess Harry left behind.

Six months into office, Ike had ended the Korean War. He had the
courage no president has since shown to tell the Israelis they must
get off occupied land. They did.

While surely repelled by Nikita Khrushchev, especially for the
Hungarian bloodbath of 1956, Ike had him up to Camp David in 1959
because, wicked as the Bolsheviks were, they had nuclear weapons, and
one must talk to them.

Prudence is the mark of the true conservative. Ike and Ronald Reagan
had it. Neither Bush nor Truman did. And that is why the former left
the country so much better off than did the latter.

Goodbye, Mr. President, and God bless."


http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/090112_bush.htm

[Fredwah]

I agree that Ike did a great job. He understood the limits of our
natinal power. He understood tright time to use power and when to
refrain. As for Bush, time will tell how history will judge him. See
www.thediscerningobserver.blog.com