The growing conservative backlash against President George Bush continues, with the latest broadsides coming from TV’s Joe Scarborough (who is a former GOP member of Congress) and Los Angeles Talk show host Doug McIntyre.
Both are blunt and underscore the growing outspoken conservative opposition to various aspects of the Bush administration. Scarborough has a blunt piece in the latest Washington Monthly which features columns by seven prominent conservatives saying a 2006 loss in the mid-term elections would be good for the GOP.
Scarborough’s op-ed piece “Save Yourself, Blame Bush” in today’s Washington Post is no less peppery: he doesn’t spare Bush criticism and basically tells GOPers in Congress that if they’re smart they’ll realize that it’s every man and woman for his/herself:
I can’t help but feel sorry for my old Republican friends in Congress who are fighting for their political lives. After all, it must be tough explaining to voters at their local Baptist church’s Keep Congress Conservative Day that it was their party that took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a record-setting $400 billion deficit.
How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?
How does a God-fearing Reagan Republican explain all that away?
Easy. Blame George W. Bush.
Escaping political death by attacking an unpopular president is hardly new — especially since most endangered politicians have the loyalty of a starving billy goat. But this is Dubya’s Washington, where the White House has pushed around, bullied and betrayed GOP lawmakers for years.
Republican House members and senators always believed that this White House took them for granted. But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, most of them had no choice but to sulk in their cloakrooms, listen to Debby Boone on their iPods and take it like a man. Bush was a rock star among the party faithful through the 2004 election, so crossing this popular commander in chief was not an option. That’s not to say that Old Bulls didn’t privately growl about how they were treated better when their old nemesis was still frolicking with an intern. So what if Bill Clinton misbehaved? At least that president found time to personally negotiate terms of subcommittee markups — even if he was defiling the Oval Office at the same time.
He notes that once Clinton left the scene, GOPers in Congress became rubber stamps, intimidated by Bush’s power and popularity with the all vital Republican base. And, he says, there are consequences:
Even when the administration would not give generals the troops they needed to win the war in Iraq, Republican leaders did nothing. When the president refused to veto a single spending bill while the deficit spiraled upward, Republican leaders looked away. And when chaos was reigning in the streets of New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast in Katrina’s horrific aftermath, Republican leaders remained mute.
That silence — proof that it is better to be feared than loved in politics — has had devastating results. The United States is more divided than ever, our leaders are despised around the world, our fiscal situation is catastrophic and congressional approval ratings are the lowest ever. Since nothing sharpens the mind like a political hanging, Republican leaders in the Senate and House are finally considering doing what effete newspaper editorialists have suggested for years: throwing Bush overboard.
Of course, the mere suggestion makes some Republican loyalists shudder. Being a faithful follower of Brother Bush has long been synonymous with loving Jesus, supporting the troops and taking a stand against sodomy. But no more. Many of the conservatives who put Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in power are counting the days until Bush goes to Crawford for good. Some mutter that their leader’s governing style looks more like Jimmy Carter’s every day — and among that crowd, there is no harsher insult.
So Scarborough has dared to say what we’ve recently suggested here: Bush’s style is less Reaganesque or even Nixonesque — and more Carteresque, minus the killer rabbit (he has had Dick Cheney with his shotgun instead).
He then notes the “positive” feedback he got from conservative friends about a segment on his show posing the whispered question about whether George Bush is an idiot, and writes:
If I were a GOP candidate this year, I would not call the president an idiot (he isn’t). But I would spend the next 50 days of the campaign telling conservatives and liberals alike that even though I voted for this war once and this president twice, time has proved that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were wrong to think that the nation could win Iraq on the cheap. I would also look them in the eye and say that our president was wrong to believe that the United States could fight a war, cut taxes and increase federal spending, all at once. I would castigate my president for claiming to support homeland security while allowing our borders to remain wide open.
I suspect that voters of all persuasions would like that message. Independence is almost always rewarded at the polls. I learned this by accident while running for Congress in 1994, when the local, state and national Republican machines worked overtime to elect my opponent in the primary. I was considered too young, too inexperienced and too conservative.
But after winning 62 percent of the vote, I arrived in Washington an independent man. I criticized Clinton for vetoing welfare reform; I went after Gingrich for backing off spending cuts. Both times, my constituents roared with approval. The best part is that I was rewarded for saying what I believed — another pointer for today’s Republicans.
His conclusion:
This year, maybe Democrats can beat something with nothing. As for Republicans, their only chance of survival is blasting the president for mistakes of the past and attacking the Democrats for their failings of the future.
Of course, you GOP candidates can be sure that such attacks will annoy Bush, even though your survival may be all that stands between him and a crazy Democratic chairman launching impeachment hearings. But if you win this fall only to face his stern rebuke next winter, just tell him it was schadenfreude for all the times the White House treated you badly. With any luck, Bush will think you are talking about that Berlin disco that Moammar Gaddafi bombed back in 1986 and then dismiss you like the worthless billy goat he always suspected you were.
Meanwhile, McIntyre, working in television’s grandfather medium, radio, offers a more blistering assessment of Bush’s term in office — and a flat-out apology — on his radio station’s website:
There’s nothing harder in public life than admitting you’re wrong. By the way, admitting you’re wrong can be even tougher in private life. If you don’t believe me, just ask Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen. But when you go out on the limb in public, it’s out there where everyone can see it, or in my case, hear it.
So, I’m saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period.
He notes that he had been a supporter of Senator John McCain, but voted for Bush in 2000 (not in 2004, due to his disagreements over the immigration issue) and gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on most issues after 911.
But then, he writes, something happened:
But in the months and years since shock and awe I have been shocked repeatedly by a consistent litany of excuses, alibis, double-talk, inaccuracies, bogus predictions, and flat out lies. I have watched as the President and his administration changed the goals, redefined the reasons for going into Iraq, and fumbled the good will of the world and the focus necessary to catch the real killers of September 11th…..
…I watched and tried to justify the looting in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. I watched and tried to justify the dismantling of the entire Iraqi army. I tired to explain the complexities of building a functional new Iraqi army. I urged patience when no WMDs were found. Then the Vice President told us we were in the “waning days of the insurgency.â€? And I started wincing again. The President says we have to stay the course but what if it’s the wrong course?
It was the wrong course. All of it was wrong. We are not on the road to victory. We’re about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear armed Iran in our wake. Bali was bombed. Madrid was bombed. London was bombed. And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It’s unspeakable. The liberal media didn’t create this reality, bad policy did.
McIntyre reminds readers that it may be 30 to 50 years before historians can give an accurate take on George Bush’s administration and that maybe 50 years from now “George W. Bush will be celebrated as a visionary genius.
But we don’t live fifty years in the future. We live now. We have to make public policy decisions now. We have to live with the consequences of the votes we cast and the leaders we chose now.
After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush I’ve reached the conclusion he’s either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.Presidential failures. James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding-— the competition is fierce for the worst of the worst. Still, the damage this President has done is enormous. It will take decades to undo, and that’s assuming we do everything right from now on. His mistakes have global implications, while the other failed Presidents mostly authored domestic embarrassments.
He points to Bush’s tax cuts, but also “reckless spending and borrowing” that is “criminal mismanagement of the public’s money.” And when he writes about the presciption drug plan, he uses the infamous “l” word that Democrats use:
He lied to his own party to get it passed. He lied to the country about its true cost. It was written by and for the pharmaceutical industry. It helps nobody except the multinationals that lobbied for it.”
He further lambastes Bush for his handling of the immigration issue and says Bush “has been a catastrophe for the wages of working people…”
Katrina, Harriet Myers, The Dubai Port Deal, skyrocketing gas prices, shrinking wages for working people, staggering debt, astronomical foreign debt, outsourcing, open borders, contempt for the opinion of the American people, the war on science, media manipulation, faith based initives, a cavalier attitude toward fundamental freedoms– this President has run the most arrogant and out-of-touch administration in my lifetime, perhaps, in any American’s lifetime.
And the Democrats? His reaction underscores why Democrats need to be concerned this election year. He considers the Democrats “equally bankrupt.”
Tragically, the Democrats have allowed crackpots, leftists and demagogic cowards to snipe from the sidelines while taking no responsibility for anything. In fairness, I don’t believe a Democrat president would have gone into Iraq. Unfortunately, I don’t know if President Gore would have gone into Afghanistan. And that’s one of the many problems with the Democrats.
He believes the two party system is collapsing and asks where have all the great leaders gone?
I believe that George W. Bush has taken us down a terrible road. I don’t believe the Democrats are offering an alternative….
….So, accept my apology for allowing partisanship to blind me to an obvious truth; our President is incapable of the tasks he is charged with. I almost feel sorry for him. He is clearly in over his head. Yet, he doesn’t generate the sympathy Warren Harding earned. Harding, a spectacular mediocrity, had the self-knowledge to tell any and all he shouldn’t be President. George W. Bush continues to act the part, but at this point whose buying the act?
Does this make me a waffler? A flip-flopper? Maybe, although I prefer to call it realism. And, for those of you who never supported Bush, its also fair to accuse me of kicking Bush while he’s down. After all, you were kicking him while he was up.
You were right, I was wrong.
What do these two commentarties taken together mean (especially when you add in the great Washington Monthly articles linked above and in the chain post link below)?
George Bush will go down in history as one of the most polarizing President’s in the entire history of the U.S.
But there now is one thing about which Democrats, an increasingly large number of independents and now some key members of his own party agree:
He is far different than the other Presidents who have served before him.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.