Bush Country:
How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane
By Phil Brennan
For NewsMax.com
It appears that Joan Walsh
of Salon.com thought she was a pretty smart cookie, parading her Scholastic
Aptitude Test score of 1200 as proof. Like many of her media colleagues she
considered President Bush’s intellectual level far below her own.
It came as something of a shock for her to learn that the 17-year-old Bush’s
SAT score was the same as hers – 1200 – and scored at a time when that was a
very hard level to reach.
In his new book, “Bush
Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane,”
widely acclaimed New York Post columnist John Podhoretz uses this story to hammer
away at the common liberal misconception that this man who learned to fly a
complicated and dangerous piece of machinery – the F-102 fighter – was rated
as a superior pilot, got an MBA, ran a Major League Baseball team and made millions
for his partners, and won two terms as governor of Texas is really quite stupid.
Podhoretz demolishes this
Bush-is-a-moron myth, which he calls “Crazy Liberal Idea #1,” and
goes on to dismember seven other Crazy Liberal Ideas, doing so with a razor-sharp
wit and driving his points home with the obvious relish that comes from skewering
a very skewerable left.
George W. Bush, he writes, came into office believing he was put on Earth to
do two things: to lead the United States into the third millenium with all its
terrifying challenges and wondrous opportunities, and to drive liberals insane.
Bush, he adds, “is
succeeding brilliantly at both.”
His claim that Bush is one
of the nation’s greatest presidents is bound to drive liberals mad, but he lays
out a stunning profusion of the president’s accomplishments as proof of his
contention.
In just three years, Bush
has led the nation into two wars, ousted two of the world’s most barbaric regimes,
redirected U.S. foreign policy to confront the threat of rogue states possessing
weapons of mass destruction, daringly embarked on a campaign to introduce democracy
into the Middle East, and reconstructed both the military and the executive
branch of government.
Moreover, as Podhoretz notes,
he shoved two huge tax cuts down the throats of a Congress that traditionally
has preferred to spend the people’s money rather than permit then to spend it
themselves, and in the process revived an economy that began to slump at the
end of the Clinton administration.
The List Goes On
Bush has run circles around
the Democrats, co-opting many of their pet programs in such fields as education
and health care. He has been deft in dealing with hot-button issues, seeking
new ways to handle those that previously have defied all efforts of compromise
between right and left.
“Taken together, all
of Bush’s presidential qualities mark him as a genuine leader and a transformative
figure on the American and world stages,” Podhoretz insists. “Love
him or hate him, respect him or revile him, George W. Bush has made extraordinary
use of the powers of the presidency and has changed the United States, its government
and the world in ways that have made an indelible mark on the new century.”
We are indeed, he writes, “living in Bush Country.”
Having dealt with Bush’s
extraordinary record, Podhoretz now begins to enjoy himself chopping away at
those eight crazy liberal ideas.
The first, that Bush is a moron, seems rooted in the president’s tendency to
mangle the mother tongue. He believes that the “chattering classes”
look down on Bush because he does not “accord with the reigning cultural
affect. …”
An Age of
Cleverness
“We pride ourselves
on self-aware displays of cleverness, constant references to popular culture
and the latest trends and a hunger for sharing the trivia we know with others,”
he writes.
Bush, it seems, is simply
not au fait with the things that really matter, such as the latest trends in
culinary consumption, cinema and up-to-date slang. He recalls with satisfaction
Bush’s rejoinder to Chris Matthews when it was suggested that he claimed an
abiding interest in the life of Winston Churchill simply to impress Churchill
fan Matthews:
“Do you think that
I’d take time out of my life to research what the hell you like?” he asked.
Podhoretz also reminds us
that Democrats automatically label Republican presidents as dunces – Ike and
Reagan especially were seen by the chatterers as less than bright.
He is unrelenting in demolishing
those Crazy Liberal Ideas. He shows how asinine is idea #2 – that Bush is a
puppet – and demonstrates convincingly that Bush is his own man.
What really controls W,
in Podhoretz’s view, is a determination to put America back on the road to the
shining city on the hill paved by Ronald Reagan. The author devotes a chapter
to showing how W has worked to bring back Reaganism and explains that the two
presidents have much in common.
The primary project of the Bush presidency is the completion of the political
reconstruction of national politics, government and policy begun by Ronald Reagan
in 1981. And this, he writes, is “doubtless what his partisan enemies fear
most about him.”
Crazy Liberal Idea #3: “Bush
is a fanatic.”
Podherotz notes that W’s
foes say he “is a reactionary both politically and theologically and that
he is effecting a religious takeover of the United States and imposing his doctrinal
fanaticism on the rest of the world.”
Man of Faith
Nonsense, says Podhoretz.
Bush is “an elected politician who happens to be religious,” and as
a man of faith he is informed by a powerful sense of right and wrong and good
and evil.” That, of course, is what upsets his paganistic critics, who
believe there are no such categories as right and wrong or good and evil; everything
is relative.
Crazy Liberal Idea #4: Bush
is another Hitler, but not as talented.
The real insult here is
that if Bush is Hitler, the United States is Nazi Germany. And that idea, he
writes, is born from Europe’s “blind and unreasoning, ugly and unjust,
foul and fetid hatred of America” and picked up by the Europhile chattering
classes.
Podhoretz deals with other
such provably idiotic charges as Crazy Liberal Idea # 5: Bush isn’t protecting
the American people, #6: Bush wants to bankrupt the government, #7: Bush is
a cowboy and #8: Bush is a liar.
As we head into the election,
Podhoretz has shown us exactly how to deal with all the Crazy Liberal Ideas
that constitute the Democratic Party’s real platform. All Democrats have in
their political arsenal is a hodgepodge of crazy ideas, distortions and lies
– and Podheretz shows us how to disarm them easily.