Day: November 5, 2006

“There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time.” — American Conservative

According to the rightwing, criticizing President Bush equals hating America. If so, then American Conservative Magazine now despises this country.

Owned by Christian Nationalist talking head Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, the superannuated rightwing European playboy, the magazine has published an editorial today, on the eve of the midterm elections, that excoriates President Bush and the Republican Party. The headline says, “GOP Must Go.”

While the content of the editorial sounds perfectly reasonable — almost like it was written by smart liberals — it may well signal a schism on the right that could cripple the coalition between christianists and libertarians that has held the Republican Party together since the Reagan era:

It should surprise few readers that we think a vote [in Tuesday’s midterm elections] that is seen — in America and the world at large — as a decisive “No” vote on the Bush presidency is the best outcome. We need not dwell on George W. Bush’s failed effort to jam a poorly disguised amnesty for illegal aliens through Congress or the assaults on the Constitution carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism or his administration’s endorsement of torture. Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why — thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.

As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation…as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides…the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony.

The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, America’s image in the world, its capacity to persuade others that its interests are common interests, is lower than it has been in memory. All over the world people look at Bush and yearn for this country…which once symbolized hope and justice…to be humbled. The professionals in the Bush administration (and there are some) realize the damage his presidency has done to American prestige and diplomacy. But there is not much they can do.

There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen…in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur…as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.

On his CNN show this morning, media analyst Howard Kurtz did two segments on John Kerry’s verbal gaffe. This is such an nonstory by now — Kerry made the misstatement six days ago — that there could only be one reason Kurtz, who is married to a Republican operative, would continue to flog at it: He was obviously and blatantly doing his best to keep the story alive two days before voting starts.

Some are suggesting that Kerry’s slip of the tongue will knock him out of contention for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Even though I’m convinced he does not believe the military is only for stupid and uneducated people — after all, he was a Yalie who volunteered to go to Vietnam — I would prefer that he shelve his presidential ambitions for good.

But the fact that Kurtz brought in two different sets of talking heads to discuss Kerry’s gaffe underscores the fundamental unfairness of the media’s coverage of Republicans and Democrats. After all, President Bush screws up public statements all the time — so frequently, in fact, that his screw-ups are routinely ignored by folks like Howie Kurtz and the Gang of 500 in the D.C. punditocracy.

I found this nice archive of Bushisms and have pulled a few of his less often repeated mangling of the language just for fun. Enjoy:

[…]