Lib's gone wild
More loonieness from the Los Angeles Times editorial Page
Betsy's Page
Jonathan Chait argues that Bush is more of a threat to the United States than Bin Laden.
<<< Those loony Democrats! But wait, is this really such a crazy view? Even though all but the loopiest Democrat would concede that Bin Laden is more evil than Bush, that doesn't mean he's a greater threat. Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains, has no weapons of mass destruction and apparently very limited numbers of followers capable of striking at the U.S.
Bush, on the other hand, has wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country. He has massively mismanaged a major war, with catastrophic consequences; he has strained the fabric of American democracy with his claims of nearly unchecked power and morally corrupt Gilded Age policies. It's quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more — if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can. >>>
Of course, we could refute his claims one by one, but that would really just be talking past each other. This is how those on the left view the President. No amount of debating would change their minds. You might remember that Jonathan Chait was the New Republic writer who wrote in March 2004 about all the reasons for his Bush hatred.
<<< I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more. >>>
(Since the original column is by subscription only, I'm giving this link to a blogger who posted the whole thing - see below.) Chait then went on to say how he hated Bush for his policies and for his partisanship.
<<< From a purely ideological standpoint, then, liberal hatred of Bush makes more sense than conservatives' Clinton fixation. Clinton offended liberals time and again, embracing welfare reform, tax cuts, and free trade, and nominating judicial moderates. When budget surpluses first appeared, he stunned the left by reducing the national debt rather than pushing for more spending. Bush, on the other hand, has developed into a truly radical president. Like Ronald Reagan, Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional regressive tax cuts. Combined with his stated desire to eliminate virtually all taxes on capital income and to privatize Medicare and Social Security, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state. >>>
Those are those tax cuts that are bringing in an amount of revenue that is surprising the New York Times. And there is that liberal denial of anything that might be done to reform entitlement programs, which, by the way, Bush never planned on privatizing. Conservatives wouldn't be so irritated with Bush if he actually were doing as Chait alleged in trying to roll back the federal government. Chait then goes on to detail how liberals resent how Bush got to be successful by parlaying his daddy's connections into an oil company that went bust and then into a baseball team and then into the governorship and then into the presidency by pretending to be a compassionate conservative. And he's dumb, besides.
<<< The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all. You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident. >>>
And now, over two years later, Chait's Bush-hatred has reached the point where he can argue in a major newspaper that Bush has done more damage to the country than Bin Laden. This might sell well in Los Angeles, but I don't think it's a winning message to try and sell to the rest of the country.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has some thoughts on what he so aptly calls Chait's "late-stage Bush Derangement Syndrome.
<<< Mr. Chait has amazing powers. He knows the weaponry of bin Laden and the extent of his networks. He sees "catastrophic consequences" which he leaves undetailed, and apparently has available to him a list of Bush claims of "nearly unchecked power," an assertion which mystifies those with an ounce of legal training --bin Laden's driver, after all, just had his day in the Supreme Court, a not unsuccessful one at that ("Sic semper Tyrannus!").
Mr. Chait is, in short, an affable if not overly-educated fellow willing to write whatever nonsense gets him some approval from the fever swamp. How he ended up with a column in The New Republic and another in the Los Angeles Times says very little about him, but much about those publications. >>>
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