By: Jezla 

This post is shared with Back Home Again. 

The primary season for the 2008 presidential election has been a long and tiring one, both for political junkies and the politicians themselves.Â&nbsp…

Why all these “moderate” people who hate Bush love McCain I don’t understand.

I don’t believe Iraq destroyed the Republican party, though it sure hurt Bush’s approval rating in the short term. But war is risky, this war was necessary, and Bush’s approval rating will go way up once the Iraq war is over and the BDS crazies move on to their next political enemy.

Overall, Iraq is clearly not at fault for the state of the Republican party. Proof: Not a single serious Republican candidate — which obviously excludes Ron Paul — was running from the Iraq war.

The second point is much more on target. Bush wanted a VP who was not running for election, so he could be more focused on the job to be done. This was a very good intention, and it made Cheney a very effective VP. But overall, it was a huge mistake on Bush’s part. He made a good choice for the time span of his administration, but a very bad choice for what comes after his administration.

The third point, immigration, is unquestionably a hot point in the Republican party, and one that Bush was on the wrong side of. But the only way Bush could have prevented it from hurting the Republican part is if he had managed to settle the issue by now. I don’t really know that anyone could have done that, so I wouldn’t feel right blaming Bush for it.

My own opinion of why the Republican party is in bad shape is something you actually hit on in the second point. The very reason that Bush picked a VP who was not interested in being president, is this: Bush is just not very partisan. This is to his credit as a man, but to the Republican party’s detriment now.

It’s why Bush tried so hard to be a uniter, not a divider. It’s why Bush did such a lousy job of defending his administration against the smears the opposition party kept sending his way. It’s why Bush didn’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to give the Republican party a strong leader at the end of his term.

The problem the Republican party has now is factionalism. Bush has allowed it to be fractured by not being an effective leader of the Republican party, by not giving it an effective leader to follow him, and by not preserving the Reagan coalition.

I believe history will give George W. Bush high marks, based on how good a job his administration did in foreign policy and in handling domestic problems. But the rating will be too generous, because they will overlook that he didn’t lead and preserve his party.

Yet, in spite of Bush’s faults, he’s better than every one of the Republican candidates in this upcoming election. This is a very disturbing thought….

… the war is McCain’s undeniable strength.

ProdigalReflections on February 6, 2008 at 1:35 PM

Beg to differ. I deny it, for instance.

Yes, he’s held firm for sticking to it in Iraq. But the war on terror is bigger than just Iraq, and bigger than just not surrendering. He undercut the president in multiple areas that were part of the war on terror:

1) Calling harsh interrogation techniques “torture” so he could make the case that he was above it
2) Demanding terrorists be given full Geneva convention protection as if they were enemy soldiers, rather than … terrorists (hiding in mosques, killing civilians, including their own, hiding behind women and children, etc)
3) Constant drumbeat of criticism against Rumsfeld, encouraging people to believe the problems in Iraq were a) because of Rumsfeld, and b) because no one was listening to McCain. For the record, Rumsfeld was dead right during the actual war, and McCain was wrong when he criticized that there weren’t enough soldiers. The occupation was a totally different story, but the State Department was making those decisions, which pretty much explains why Iraq was so bad for so long.

At the exact time that virtually the entire Democratic party and their media wing, aka the mainstream media, were on the attack against Bush, McCain was grandstanding to impress them.

And now McCain wants to take credit for the surge? The surge that Bush put into effect was not what McCain was asking for. McCain simply wanted more troops, and he wanted them from day one. The surge did include more troops, but not a lot more. The real difference was the change in tactics in the counterinsurgency.

Those who think McCain will be an improvement in the war on terror will be greatly disappointed.

1. “Money trumps everything” – George Bush at a press conference.

2. On matters that you strongly about: to hell with the party; vote your conscience.

That plus the loose network connecting a lot of these mega and emergent churches may be helping spread Huck’s peculiar political gospel in a way that doesn’t show up on anyone’s radar.

You’re not seeing how broad a spectrum I’m suggesting. Obama will siphon a significant portion of the emergent church vote from the evangelical bloc.

I can not see the long term validity to conservatives giving up the ghost this election. Whenever taxes are enacted, it is nearly impossible to retract those increases. Whenever a government bureaucracy is legislated into existence, it is next to impossible to retract or to cut back anything once taken hold.

Even if McCain gets elected instead of either official Democrat, his only loyal servants are liberals. Conservatives owe McCain nothing, and are closely observed and contacted by their constituents. I do not concede that Republican Congressmen and Senators will support McCain’s liberal agenda just because of the (R). No conservative can stay home from the 2008 election because we must elect conservatives and Republicans across the board in local and federal positions.

If McCain’s record sings one praise, it aligns towards conservative domestic spending, more so than any other remaining candidate, although paying to continue the Iraq war will keep taxes high. At least remaining in Iraq would likely consist of maintaining a US military installation base rather than repeating the Vietnam experience of propping up dictators that the CIA endorses. I do not know that McCain will over-tax America in order to fit into the Democrat pocket more easily, as he would be wearing the presidential pockets. Once elected, in his mind McCain owes nothing to either Democrats or Republicans. He won, not we, but he. As far as that is concerned with McCain, maybe that’s the best we can hope for now. Support efforts to streamline Iraqi involvement, actively pursue jihadists and al Quaeda from a magnificent US-Iraqi base treaty, complete lower tax reformation, enforce current immigration laws, and establish the border security and stronger military.

My wish list.

TX Mom on February 6, 2008 at 3:12 PM

That’s the kind of thing I’ve been trying to get at with Huckabee’s support. He’s close to Rick Warren, who all but endorsed him a while back. Warren is hugely influential. That plus the loose network connecting a lot of these mega and emergent churches may be helping spread Huck’s peculiar political gospel in a way that doesn’t show up on anyone’s radar.

It’s a theory, anyway.

I agree 100%.

I’ve little use for blaming all the world’s problems on Bush, as the Left does and will continue to do, but those are all great and valid points as to how we got here.

Respectfully asking Cheney, who never had any intention of running for President, to step down prior to ’04, so a potential successor could take his place, would have been a great idea.

At the very least, it might have avoided the all out civil war we have now with the coalition around him and the administration.

I keep telling myself that this will not have negative repercussions for years to come, but more and more I do not believe it.

Conservatives are the new Blacks. And we all know how well that worked for them!

. . . not enough deeds.

2. There is a significant division developing within the Evangelical/conservative Christian culture, also termed the ‘Emergent Church’, which tends to be more liberal in its political leanings.

I also think this is a problem for the conservatives. The evangelical vote is no longer reliably conservative in all areas. This is why Huckabee is appealing. I think they don’t catch his foreign policy mistakes and they agree with his populist economics.

Now, Bush did some economically conservative things in office (tax cuts, for example), but he also did many non-conservative things. And I think he really came through on foreign policy after 9/11, especially in his first term. And his social conservatives bona fides (judges, stem cells) have remained true. But philsophically, he’s not a hardline conservative and no hardline conservatives have been trained up under his leadership of the party.

I think as long as Republicans are fooled by economic moderates then the conservative movement is in trouble. We have to learn how to sell economic conservatism to the public better than we do. And we have to quit letting the media take down our best conservative leaders (Newt, Quayle, Delay, etc). We need to learn to defend these guys, and they need to learn that the press is watching and they must behave.

someone on February 6, 2008 at 2:20 PM

I quoted the whole article, benevolently to illustrate how liberals have brought destruction upon Conservatism.
I posted that the article was not completely accurate.
The rest you can perch on and twirl.

BTW I have Ashkenazi heredity.

Sydney Carton:
Better stop parroting the Paul platform or you’ll be mercilessly ridiculed :-)

I wasn’t aware that I was. Paul is a moron.

Speakup: great job explaing the neocons who destroyed this administration’s credibility

Bryan: Peggy Noonan said YES last year.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010148