find a kernel of corn every now and again. William F. Buckley on our War President:
- What exactly will President Bush do about the Iraqi mess? He has said over and over that a president must be prepared to make decisions, however difficult, and stick to them. But surely one decision he can have arrived at during the political purgation is that things are not going well in Iraq. It is one thing to reiterate during a political campaign that a president must make hard choices and stick to them, quite another to say that a president cannot draw back and recalculate at very basic levels.
Too bad the jubilant young “conservatives” over at Natty Review don’t listen to their elders.
In other news, Matt “Don’t Sweat the Dead Babies” Welch pretty accurately pegs what libertarians and everyone else should expect of Bush 2.0:
- 1) There is zero reason to believe Bush will ever listen to libertarians, about anything. …
2) Energized Republican majorities in Congress will seek to re-write rules at the expense of the “obstructionist minority.” I heard Republican congressmen use that exact phrase twice during Election Night.
And look for the congressmen to continue spending money like drunken sailors. Pork works, especially if there is no veto to scale it back, and now that this approach has been given a handsome popular-vote mandate, why change now? …
3) Bush will even feel less constrained in conducting an aggressive, occasionally go-it-alone foreign policy. In the words of Bush voter Stephen Green, “On the plus side, we’ll stop jerking around with the insurgents in Fallujah. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and CENTCOM won’t have to worry any longer about delicate domestic sensibilities. Finally, they’ll be free to do the killing—and there’s no nicer word for it—that needs to be done there.” …
I’ll resist the temptation to say “I told you so” and just link two of my own essays – one from February, the other from last Saturday. For posterity’s sake, of course.