Okay, Roger. Instead of making sweeping statements regarding your comments on what you criticize President Bush for, let me examine some of your criticisms in detail and explain why I think your main point is that Bush's problem is that his policy has not been far enough to the right.
* He started off his administration very poorly by trying to make friends with Ted Kennedy. That gesture led to Kennedy essentially writing the "No Child Left Behind Act" that has so many flaws it's ridiculous. The only thing that would have given teeth to the bill would have been school choice and merit pay for teachers and those were left out of the final bill. Never trust a Kennedy!
The Kennedys are of course a symbol and a beacon of liberal America. If you criticize Bush for co-operating with Ted Kennedy, you are most certainly criticizing him for not being right-wing enough.
* In the battle for Afghanistan, he gave far too much power to the lawyers who had to approve every single action taken there (and in Iraq, too, for that matter). The delay cost us our chance to kill Mullah Omar in 2001 when we had his convoy in our sights. A single Predator missile and he would have been taken out.
Here you criticize him for trying to make war by the book and not overstep international agreements on what amounts to acceptable warmaking. You accuse him of not being a sufficiently ruthless killer. That is a right-wing position in my book.
(The two mistakes that the United States made in Afghanistan are twofold, the way I see it. First, when the Americans were on Osama bin Laden's trail, someone in charge decided that it would be too risky and cost too many American soldiers' lives to confront him directly, since he was holed up somewhere surrounded by armed supporters who had a special knowledge of the terrain that the Americans couldn't match. Therefore, the American troops themselves didn't go after Osama at all, but instead they paid local people whom they considered loyal to the West to risk
their lives to capture America's number one enemy. Well, these locals either fled or were bribed not to give Osama's precise location away. In other words, the Americans allowed Osama bin Laden to get away because they were too scared to go after him themselves.
The second and biggest mistake the Americans made in Afghanistan was to basically desert Afghanistan before the job there was done, even though it was Afghanistan that had been the main ally of the real enemy of the United States, Al Queda. Instead President Bush ordered most of his troops to attack Iraq to fight a war against a man who had had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever.)
* He did not continue with his stated policy of a tax cut every year. While he had a good tax cut in 2001 that got us out of the dot com bust and had a decent capital gains tax cut in 2003, after that, nothing. While those tax cuts were taking effect, our economy improved considerably, millions of jobs were created, and the deficit fell in half. Conservatives take tax cuts very seriously and will remember that when election time comes when a Republican goes against his promises. Just look at 1992 and 2006 as examples where the Republican voters came out to fire their incumbents.
You keep insisting that tax cuts work wonders for the economy and creates millions of new jobs. According to Scott Lilly's report (see page 7 of his report), the number of jobs created outside the farming sector grew by 3.3% between 2000 and 2007, while during the same period the American population grew by 7%. Effectively there were fewer jobs available for the existing population in 2007 than there had been in 2000.
Scott Lilly also claims that workers were not compensated for their increasing productivity between the years 2000 and 2008. Therefore, the extra money that the American workers generated went not to themselves but almost exclusively to the owners of the factories and other workplaces. The employers grew much richer while those who generated the wealth did not get compensated for their increased productivity at all.
Lilly claims that the huge majority of the Ameircan people became somewhat poorer in actual terms between 2000 and 2006, including those belonging to the 60th to 80th percentile (those whose income is higher than 60-80% of the population). Only those who made more money than 80% of the population made any actual income gains. See page 9 for a graph on how the increase in income was divided between households from different parts of the economic spectrum.
Most of the extra money that was generated between 2000 and 2006 went into corparate profits. According to a graph on page 11, annual corporate profits growth between 1950 and 2000 was 1.9%, but between 2000 and 2006 that figure had risen to 10.5%.
On page 12 of his report, Lilly claims that corporate profits grew much faster than GDP during 2000-2006. Between 1950 and 2000, GDP grew by 368 percent while corparate profits grew by 218 percent. The rise in corporate profits was a little less than two thirds of GDP. In other words, between 1950 and 2000 both corporate profits and GDP grew a lot, but the country as a whole increased its wealth more than the corporations did.
Between 2000 and 2006, however, corporate profit grew by 66%, while GDP grew by only 17%. Most of the fresh new wealth that was generated during this time ended up in corporations (and was probably divided among CEOs and other owners and shareholders). See page 12 of Lilly's report.
I find your claim that tax cuts generates general wealth for the entire nation an extremely right-wing and downright unfounded one.
* When he did get tax cuts passed, he didn't push hard to make them permanent when they were first enacted. Instead he acquiesced to antiquated Senate rules which allowed sunset provisions to be put into the bill. So rather than having a permanent tax cut people could count on to still be there in the future, people and businesses had to hedge for the possibility that the tax cuts will expire and people will see an enormous tax increase. So now we have two presidential candidates running around claiming they're going to cut middle class taxes when all they'll really do is keep rates right where they are, assuming they even follow through on the promises, which I doubt. That's not a tax cut.
Again you talk about the tax cuts that Bush did pass as something that created general wealth, when all evidence is that his tax cuts enriched those who were already
very wealthy and left almost everyone else worse off. And you criticize him for not making his tax cuts for the rich permanent. If that is not a right-wing position, I don't know what is.
* With Republican control of Congress before our current oil prices started skyrocketing, he should have successfully lobbied for opening offshore drilling and ANWR years ago. Some Republicans resisted, but a deal should still have been done. Enough conservative Democrats signed on to make it bipartisan. Instead, Bush mentioned it for a while but never fought for it. We'd be better off today if that oil was producing now.
Very many people claim that not only does oil pollute the environment, but America's dependence on oil is the root cause of its dependence on dictators of oil-rich countries in the Middle East.
Anyway, drilling for oil is sure to be a short-term solution. It wasn't long ago that you only needed to drill a hole in Texas and there was so much oil there that it was welling up out of that hole of its own accord. How much oil is left now? In Texas? In the world? How long can we keep solving problems by drilling for oil more and more aggressively?
It takes Mother Nature millions of years, maybe hundreds of millions of years, to turn fossils into oil. But it sure doesn't take humanity long to use up that oil. What are we going to do when it is gone, or when it is so deep down that it is commercially impossible to try to get it to the surface? What then? How about looking aggressively for alternative energy sources instead? Asking for more efforts to get Ameirca more oil, while ignoring its needs for alternative energy, is certainly a right-wing position in my book. And I just read somewhere, maybe in the Lilly report, that Bush had cut down federal grants to agencies and scientists working to find alternative energy sources.
* He had a comprehensive energy policy that included new nuclear reactors, new electrical infrastructure for replacing our aging ones, additional refineries, and new drilling as well as huge spending on alternative energy. He barely tried to get it passed. If he had succeeded with Republicans in control of the White House and Capitol Hill, it should have been doable. We would be on our way to lessening foreign dependency on energy instead of stuck in the mud like we are now with oil still at exorbitant prices.
Good! Here you voice a left-wing position and a criticism of Bush from the left.
* Bush failed to defend the US dollar. When the dollar first started falling, the markets had the perception, probably correctly, that President Bush supported a weak dollar. So rather than using the Treasury Department to send signals to the market on US intentions to support the dollar even if only just with words, he did nothing and watched while the dollar tanked. Perception matters a lot in the markets. By acquiescing, Bush only served to make the dollar fall further and harder. Only recently when people finally figured out the US economy was stronger than the rest of the world and always has been did the dollar begin to appreciate again. While a weak dollar is good for exports, it didn't help in the long run with our current accounts deficit with oil rising to a high of $147/barrel for Light, Sweet Crude, more than offsetting our large export gains in other areas.
Here is what an admittedly left-wing colleague of mine claims is the reason for the falling dollar. President Bush's tax cuts made him less able to pay for a war that has cost billions. In order to give himself enough money to keep all those troops in Iraq, President Bush simply demanded that the printing presses work harder and produce more dollars. But when you increase the output of dollars without having the increase of true wealth to back up the increase of dollars, you are bound to have inflation. In other words, the dollar fell because of the increasing output of dollars, which was made to offput the effects of the tax cuts and the underfinanced war in Iraq. Not being willing to see this connection is a right-wing position in my book.
* He did not fire Donald Rumsfeld, General George Casey, and General John Abizaid soon enough. Those men were the architects of the minimum force necessary policy and stuck to it to the bitter end even though it was plain progress wasn't being made. Once he fired them and replaced them with Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, the war in Iraq started going our way, and in a hurry. Unfortunately, now it's too late and his popularity rating is still mired at 30%, making him an anchor on Republicans in 2008.
At least you and I share a dislike for Donald Rumsfeld.
* We should have asked Iraq to pay for part of our war effort. I understand Bush wanted to show that we weren't there for oil, but the Iraqis should have at least paid for part of the cost of the war. Instead, they've essentially paid nothing so far and get $75 billion a year in oil revenues. Even a quarter of that would have helped to offset some of the costs.
I find this claim quite staggering. Your country makes war against another country, and you ask that other country to pay for your war there?
The Bush administration has seen to it that those Iraqis it disliked most have been executed or defeated, and instead it has helped Iraqis it likes better to gain power. Now those Iraqis that the Bush administration helped won't pay you. Well, tough luck. Why don't you leave those Iraqis alone and let them fend for themselves? I agree, it is a bad idea to make war for charity.
* He implicitly admitted that Guantanamo was a place of torture by saying that it should be shut down at first opportunity, playing into his enemies' hands. Every visitor to Guantanamo, including the Red Cross, has said that the prisoners there were better off than people in many of America's prisons. Basically Bush had no communications skills and was ineffective in fending off the torture charge. What he should have done was to make it a place for prisoners to fear. Instead, many prisoners gained weight and got better care than our own prison population.
Well, wow. Guantanamo is a prison which holds some people who are certainly bona fide terrorists and many people who are almost certainly innocent of any real wrong-doing. And you keep them there, year after year, without trial. And you ask the rest of the world to be impressed because conditions in Guantanmo are better than they are in many American prisons? I'm not sure people abroad are impressed. In fact, I think that all over the world, many people still find your imprisonment of people in Guantanamo without honest trials quite shocking. And in my book, defending Guantanamo is very much a right-wing position.
* We should have killed al Sadr when we had the chance after four contractors were brutally killed and dragged through the streets of Fallujah. When the Mahdi Militia first raised its ugly head, we should have cut it off in Fallujah. Instead we sent in an Iraqi colonel who was actually sympathetic to al Sadr's cause. We should have gone in there with overwhelming force and killed him. If he wanted to be a martyr, by all means oblige him. Instead, al Sadr's been a pain in our side for years and has caused the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers.
Kill, kill, kill. Do more killing. Criticizing Bush for not doing enough killing is not to criticize him from the left.
* We should have given Israel our IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes so that they could take out Iran's nuclear capabilities if they were confident of success. Instead, by depriving them of our IFF codes, Israel was unable to launch any attack since they would have been attacked by our own fighters.
I think you are saying here that the United States should help Israel to attack and bomb Iran. I take it you mean that Israel should be allowed to bomb Iran just because Iran may be building a nuclear device, not because they have actually attacked Israel. If you think that America isn't as respected abroad as it ought to be now, wait until you see how people will react to you if you help Israel bomb Iran just because Iran may be getting itself the kind of weapon that Israel already possesses.
I consider the position that Israel should be allowed to bomb Iran an extremely right-wing one.
* President Bush did an extremely poor job communicating what really happened during Hurricane Katrina, whether it be through surrogates or direct contacts with the media. He knew the media were unjustly painting him with blame for all the failures that happened, but he didn't have any idea how to get the word out about what really happened. Instead he let the media paint him as an incompetent, essentially killing the rest of his presidency. That was the moment President Bush became a true lame duck president. To make matters worse, he apologized for the failures of the federal government, making the media look like they were right.
So the only thing that Bush did wrong during the Katrina disaster was that he failed to communicate that nothing that happened there was any responsibility of his. I suppose the fact that New Orleans is still suffering badly from the devastations of Katrina has nothing to do with a lack of commitment from the administration to help that city recover.
* The president failed to communicate the discovery of WMD in Iraq. Regardless of whether they were small in number compared to what was expected (roughly 500 warheads discovered), he should have immediately made it public with an a press conference. Instead the administration buried it. When Senator Rick Santorum and Representative Pete Hoekstra asked the president's people why, they were told that the administration was tired of being beaten up by the media and didn't think they could win the media battle after already losing it the first time. Hello! Bully pulpit! The presidency!?!? Ronald Reagan never flinched at that kind of challenge. The Great Non-Communicator. Hmph.
My point is that if Bush had tried to make a big deal about those 500 rather rusted warheads, he would have been made into a global laughing-stock. So those rustbuckets are what could have destroyed the world in fifteen minutes, or whatever Bush's friend Tony Blair said?
* The president signed onto a horrible Democratic plan to give tax rebate checks to people with the economy beginning to go south. Clearly that didn't work as I had said it wouldn't. A demand-side solution never works. Even though he was a lame duck, he should have painted the Democrats as do-nothings and tried to get a good tax cut passed. A good tax cut goes a lot farther than a brief one-time only rebate check.
It's amazing that rebate checks to poor people are bound to backfire, while tax cuts to rich people will always work like magic. Clearly Moses must have been given a third tablet on Mount Sinai with an eleventh commandment, Thou shalt always lower taxes for the rich. But maybe that tablet was lost somehow and only resurfaced in the GOP headquarters.
* The president agreed to sign a bill for a minimum wage increase to $6.55 in the midst of a declining economy. That will only serve to hurt the economy more and cost more jobs.
The Lilly report said that the minimum wage was at its lowest level for fifty years when it was adjusted upwards in 2007. (See page 3.) Your position is that an adjustment upwards of wages for the very poorest people is a bad thing, while tax cuts for the richest people is a good thing. How can anyone say that that is not a right-wing position?
* Worst of all of the above is a failure to communicate about Iraq in general. He was far too passive, letting his enemies define him rather than always taking the offensive against the media. Ronald Reagan knew that 90% of the media was against him. He didn't care. He went over their heads to the American people and explained things simply and with conviction. President Bush, instead, went into hiding as Democrats and the press started accusing him of lying about the justifications for war. With the power of the bully pulpit, he could have made mincemeat of the Democrats. Instead he let them paint him as a liar all in the spirit of bipartisanship. By trying to be bipartisan, he stayed silent while watching his enemies destroy him. When he finally decided to fight back, he was too late. His enemies had already successfully defined him. It didn't matter that commission after commission, such as the Robb-Silbermann Commission, the 9/11 Commission, the Butler Commission, etc. always found that no lies were told. When one side attacks and the other side doesn't respond, the attacker always wins.
Right. Everyone who was against the Iraq war was misinformed. There was absolutely nothing wrong about attacking Iraq, and instead the only problem was that Bush failed to teach the rest of the world that they were wrong and he was right.
There is a story about a proud mother who watched her son taking part in a march. Afterwards she explained that all those other boys in the parade took the wrong kind of steps, and only her son had got it right.
All right, Roger. That is why I think that you are attacking Bush from the right.
Ann
