In my opinion, it would be difficult to select competent experienced advisers who were not those with an agenda. The difference between the Bush advisers and say Clinton/Gore advisers I am quite confident, would be that you are more comfortable with the Clinton/Gore agenda than the Bush agenda. But to take a position that Bush advisers are somehow tainted because the agenda differs is unrealistic and unfair. Personally, i didn;t care much for Robert Reich, Donna Shalala, et al. (and any respect for their integrity I totally lost when they failed to resign during the Lewinski scandal)but I did admire their intellect and commitment their agenda. I find Bush selection of advisers to reflect the Bush agenda. The quality is very good, plenty of experience and plenty of intellect, hardly backward thinking. Liberals like to use the term "isolationist"like it is a bad thing. its not necessarily. But in this case I think it is misused because I think the Bush agenda is more to put a primiary emphasis on US interest first and that is refreshing after the past eight years. Tangibly, the Bush gambit on missile defense appears to be paying off with the joint statement of Putin and Bush tying arms reduction to missile defense. The Europeans were wrong about the deployment of Pershings and they appear to have been wrong again about missile defense.
The tax cut being risky? In light of the fact that it phases in over 11 years, I can not hold this a valid criticism. Bush enviro policy has been misrepresetned I beleive by a leftist mianstream press in the US and he has shown some flexibility on the "global warming" issue for which he is not given credit.
Your comments about a powerful state are quite out of step with the Bush agenda. I would need to see specific examples of what you refer to to comment more definitively. In fact it is my impression (and I do live in the US) that quite the opposite is true. Bush is typically conservative, lower taxes, smaller government, more local control of issues that matter locally like education.
JLA |
