Birthday Gift for President Bush : Some Sympathy!
President Bush celebrates his 60th birthday on Thursday. A surprise birthday gift comes his way in the form of a column by Fareed Zakaria in the Newsweek magazine.
Zakaria asks sympathetically why is that the Bush administration, despite its recent broad shift in American diplomacy, still gets unfavourable response within the country and worldwide.
“The Bush administration must wonder these days if it has a Rodney Dangerfield problem. No matter what it does, it can’t seem to get any respect.
“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has engineered a broad shift in American diplomacy over the last year, moving policy toward greater multilateralism, cooperation and common sense on Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and several other issues.
“And yet it hasn’t produced a change in attitudes toward the United States. The recent Pew global survey documents a further drop in America’s poor image abroad.
“President Bush tried to be conciliatory while visiting Europe last week but confronted an angry public. A poll published in the Financial Times on the eve of his visit showed that across the continent, the United States was considered a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea.
“Why aren’t people noticing the new, improved Bush foreign policy? First, the changes coming out of Washington have been very recent. Perhaps more important, they remain incremental and incomplete.
“This is probably because they are still contested within the administration. Almost all of those officials who embody the administration’s crude and clumsy policies of the first term — led by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — remain in office. They merely appear to be lying low, for now.
“So there’s a limit to how much things can change. What appears like a revolution in Bush policy — the administration is now finally thinking that maybe, possibly, Guantánamo should be shut down — often is just the belated arrival of common sense.
“Rice and her team are clearly in charge—and extremely capable—but they operate within fairly tight constraints. The result is that the new approach retains many elements of the old: hectoring rhetoric, constant conditions and stiff demands…”
Bush is part of the first wave of the 78-million strong baby boomers to enter their senior years.
Baby boomers, generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, now dominate the halls of power. As of last year, they controlled 41 of the nation’s 50 governorships, exactly half of the 100 Senate seats and 275 of the 435 House seats. With the ascension of John Roberts Jr. and Samuel Alito Jr., they have even begun to crack that last bastion of the Silent Generation, the Supreme Court, where with Clarence Thomas they now have three of nine seats.
“Born in New Haven, Conn., on July 6, 1946, 10 months after the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, Bush represents the first wave of the postwar generation to reach its seventh decade. Others turning 60 this year include Cher, Reggie Jackson, Diane Keaton, Liza Minnelli, Dolly Parton, Susan Sarandon, Suzanne Somers, Steven Spielberg, Kenneth Starr and Donald Trump, not to mention Bush’s wife, Laura, and his predecessor, Bill Clinton.”
Mr Bush will hold birthday celebrations tomorrow, inviting “150 close friends and family” to dinner, before watching Washington’s Independence Day firework display, says The Guardian.
“But it is impossible to avoid the sense that turning 60 is a genuine personal shock for the world’s most powerful baby boomer – as it surely will be for other members of the generation who, according to the cliche, believed they would live forever.”
6 Responses to “Birthday Gift for President Bush : Some Sympathy!”
Bush deserves no sympathy for the hubris of his politics and lack of being a real “uniter”. He claimed a mandate after 2004, it was not anything like Reagans victories. Bush also lacks any of the nonpartisan politics of Reagan, Reagan worked with a Democratic Congress. When Bolton-Cheney-Rumsfeld are reigned in the realist policy of Rice may be believeable as FZ writes. But she also has to worry about Cheney’s mole daughter in the DoS. Bush needs – to be pulled by the ear by his mother and get a good “whoopin” behind the Crawford woodshed -for tearing off the legs of the Iraq frog.
spare us the crocadile tears, fareed. it’s rather like an arsonist asking why people still want him jail. “i’m only starting little fires now!”
I think if had reversed course earlier, when so many critics within his administration and some from his father’s had tried to reason with him, it might have turned out differently. He wouldn’t admit any mistakes, treated his critics as defeatists, and tried to make his disasters look like victories just to save his ego. Finally, his credibility, popularity and competence ratings fell in the toilet, even among those in his own party. Two thirds of the country knew his policies had been disasterous for America. Then, he changed course, just to save his sorry legacy. His one and only accomplishment has been that we have not been attacked since 9/11, but we have lost so much just to achieve that goal. He was stubborn, divisive and arrogant to Americans and other nations, and defied logic in his risky unilateralist policy. I’m glad Condi is now taking the lead instead of Cheney and Rumsfeld, but isn’t too little too late?
Bush gets “no respect” because he treats foreign policy like a partisan bludgeon hammer and not as something that should pull the country together. Most of the American people see through everything Bush does now as a crass attempt to appeal to the GOP base – either the voting base (Christian rightists) or the donor base (thus the “liberal” immigration policy. He has utter contempt for much of the nation – and the world. These recent subtle adjustments are the result of necessity, not a warming or changing heart.
Is Zakaria angling for some administration position as American hegemony begins to fade? Why else would he become an apologist for the most vicious, deceitful, self-serving, and incompetent government in American history led by a callow, disinterested, lying moralizer? Why don’t people state the obvious – that the ultimate and essentially unfixable problem is that Bush and Co. are just not all that smart. By any measure George Bush barely reaches average in terms of intelligence. He is dull, incurious, anti-intellectual, and narrow minded (thanks to Barbara Bush the Elder). His Vice-President is a paranoid manipulator (and college flunk-out) who made a total hash out of Halliburton when he ostensibly ran it (who else would have acquired Dresser Industries with its hundreds of millions of dollars in asbestos litigation claims). The rest of the so-called “inner circle” are no better at critical thinking or penetrating analysis. These people get no respect because they have earned no respect but have instead conspire to ruin our form of constitutional democracy. Shame on Fareed Zakaria and his embarrassing toadying.
Please. It’s “reined in” not “reigned in” unless one is making some ridiculous allusion (not illusion) to King George.
English, people.