Aw, shucks. The understandable red-state appeal of George W. Bush as depicted (thanks, Brian M.) in an imaginary post-presidential interview, the good ol’ boy who can throw a baseball. I still think Dick Cheney was the real president. Bush was like the out-of-it late Tsar, a nice country gentleman fed lies by his ministers really running the country. Like plausible deniability: he told untruths he thought were true.
Well, the critics just assumed my degree was bought and paid for by my dad. The thing I don’t get about that assumption is, shouldn’t there be more outrage that Yale is selling diplomas? That’d be bigger than Watergate. You’re a journalist. Get on it, boy.
Two good ol’ boys:
He’s actually a hilarious guy. We were painted as enemies but I really like Bill Clinton. He’d often make me laugh so hard, I’d spit my beer out.
I don’t miss him (Cheney) politically. But I’ll give credit where it’s due: he didn’t invade Iran though some in the administration wanted him to, and he wanted to do something (regrettably, a state solution) about the mortgage bubble about five or six years before it burst. Video (thanks, John): Barney Frank thought everything was just fine. Sailer’s point: handing people, because of their colour, mortgages they can’t afford is obviously bad business and illogical. But like the burst bubble, Bush’s jacking up the debt (not a fiscal conservative nor a true foreign-policy one) for his wars also contributed to the depression.
But:
Do you regret the war in the Middle East?
Do I regret sending our guys down there? No I do not. I obviously don’t want any soldiers to die and my heart goes out to their families but the war was a decision we made as a country to fight, not just Osama bin Laden but, really, extremist Islam.
Think of it this way: Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. We’re not far from the day it outnumbers Christianity. A lot of Americans, myself included, aren’t too happy with those odds. Now, I accept that almost half the population doesn’t want this war but a lot of us still see it as fighting the good fight.
We saw the terrorism that Extremist Islam begets as a threat to our way of life. It’s like the modern version of the Cold War. They’re our commies.
Er, Iraq was nothing to do with Osama bin Laden; it was a secular country, the sort of Muslims he hates. You don’t want to live in a Muslim country. Want to see a scary one? Look at Saudi Arabia, where incidentally most of the 9/11 hijackers were from.
This is interesting, agreeing with Charley’s point that Bush is just an easygoing liberal Protestant like his dad in the Rockefeller Republican mould, only slightly more moralistic (his wife’s Methodism helping him kick alcohol abuse), and not the evangelical Karl Rove painted him as:
I’m not talking about the whole religion obviously but a huge portion of Islam is about uniting church and state. We spent a long time separating the two and there’s no need to go backwards.
So sure, he was dead wrong about war in the Near East but not the theocrat the left made him out to be. (And think about it: aren’t the churchmen who want state gay marriage — faiths have the right to govern themselves so the liberal Protestants can go right ahead — trying to impose their faith on Catholics, on their own Protestant brethren of the conservative persuasion, and others? Scratch a cuddly granola; find a Cromwell.)
Some jottings about the news
