[IP] perceptive commentary
Begin forwarded message:
From:
Date: October 8, 2005 11:35:08 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: perceptive commentary
take a look at his besat i have seen on bush problems
not for attributing to me
http://www.thebusinessonline.com/SectionStories.aspx?
SectionID=F200D393-0200-421B-894F-33C0717ACBD6&menu=1/3
Summery
IT should have been the crowning moment of his administration, the
opportunity to exercise one of his most important privileges as
President by picking two new judges to serve on the Supreme Court,
thereby stamping his mark on American society for the next few
decades, as only a few presidents have done before him. Instead,
President Bush’s astonishingly short-sighted decision last week to
nominate a close colleague with no judicial track record for the
Supreme Court, following an earlier uninspired choice, risks
condemning his administration to being remembered as the most
debilitating since the sorry rule of Jimmy Carter in the late
1970s.... But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer
President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear
that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for
Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his
lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often
wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to
destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then
reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal
Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of.
...Last month’s death from thyroid cancer of Chief Justice William
Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor was a unique
opportunity for Mr Bush to tilt the Supreme Court to the right,
completing the reversal of the liberal dominance instituted under
President Roosevelt seven decades ago. There is not much in Mr Bush’s
conservative social agenda that we admire but the two vacancies were
an opportunity finally to bring down the curtain on the
unconstitutional judicial activism which has dominated the Court
since the Roosevelt years. Sadly but characteristically, Mr Bush has
blown it: instead of the conservative intellectual jurists that his
supporters had the right to expect, Mr Bush has made the mediocre
John Roberts, a moderate conservative with an undistinguished legal
track record, the new Chief Justice and nominated Harriet Miers for
the O’Connor vacancy.
...The modern Supreme Court has set the standard for America’s lesser
courts to use the judicial system as a mechanism for social change,
for which Americans did not necessarily vote, in areas ranging from
school bussing and prayer to the death penalty and abortion (and most
recently the powers of the President versus those of Congress in
times of war). An extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court in
June illustrates its power and the controversial nature of its
decisions: it ruled five to four that local governments could force
property owners to sell their homes to private developers whenever
officials decide it would “benefit the public”, even if the property
is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed.
...They were already furious at the President’s incompetent selling
of his social security reforms; they were equally angry at the
collapse of his plans for major tax reforms through White House
neglect; they have watched in despair as the President’s upbeat
rhetoric in Iraq was confounded regularly by tragic events, including
an appalling American death toll and a neo-con mission clearly
adrift; those who fought the good fight to restrain government in the
Reagan years stood by in disgust as Mr Bush increased domestic
spending faster than at any time since President Johnson’s Great
Society; and the nativist right is increasingly and dangerously surly
at what it views as the President’s failure to tackle illegal
immigration and secure the country’s borders.
...Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when
senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy
of public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat
left to cut in federal spending and that “after 11 years of
Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, it was clear
that the inmates had indeed taken over the asylum.
...Far more Americans now describe themselves as conservatives than
liberals; the Democrats now need to grab 60% of moderates if they
want to win Congress or the White House, a pretty high hurdle,
especially given the unimpressive state of the Democrat Party, which
is increasingly in the grip of its left-wing activists and devoid of
fresh or stimulating ideas.
The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America
over the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in
modern Western politics; it is unique to the United States, helping
to explain the country’s exceptionalism and its growing cultural
divergence with Europe. The damning charge against Mr Bush is that,
instead of using the continued dominance of the right to finish the
large amounts of uncompleted business from the Reagan revolution –
sorting out the social security system, simplifying the tax code,
tackling America’s abysmal primary and secondary schools, reforming
corporate welfare with the same gusto as welfare for the poor was
reformed, forging a new consensus to wage the war or terror – Mr Bush
has failed in all these areas, and in some has taken America backwards.
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/