Re dissatisfaction with Bush, I pulled two items from my collection, one elegant and one profane.
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WHAT CONSERVATIVES REALLY THINK OF BUSH.
Thought Experiment
by Franklin Foer
- Franklin Foer is a senior editor at The New Republic
Nobody has complained louder about the Harriet Miers appointment than David Frum. In the days before Miers's nomination, the former Bush speechwriter began issuing dire warnings about the foolishness of tapping his old White House colleague: "In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met." It's a pretty devastating assessment, or, rather, devastating if you share Frum's assumption: Only a fool would entertain notions of Bush's brilliance.
It's interesting to see Frum cast a negative eye towards Bush worshipers, because not so long ago you could have arguably placed him in that category. While he has always had some harsh words for the people who work in the White House, he wrote a whole book in 2003, The Right Man, fêting the president who presides over the place--"nothing short of superb as a wartime leader." Now, he seems to have officially renounced this old stance. "The younger Bush has based his personnel decisions upon a network of personal connections in which competence does not always play the largest part," he wrote last week.
This is the striking feature of the conservative backlash against Miers: It hasn't just involved a searing critique of the nominee, but also a damning assessment of the man who sent up her name. (A small sample of right-wing Bush-bashing from Rod Dreher on National Review's Corner: "I fully expect that if Justice Stevens retires, President Bush will nominate his dog Barney to fill that vacant seat. After all, who can a man trust to be loyal more than his dog?")
As the Miers debate reveals, many conservative intellectuals have exactly the same problems with Bush as liberals. They disdain his cronyism, doubt his intelligence, question his use of "character" to judge individuals, and can't stand his pandering to evangelicals. "The trouble with Harriet is that she has given us a depressing glimpse into the vast open space that now appears to be the Bush political mind," a piece on The Weekly Standard's website argued last week.
If you only read the conservative press, the president's tumble from grace might seem rather abrupt. The Right Man had lots of company at the bookstore--think John Podhoretz's Bush Country, Ronald Kessler's Character Matters, and so on. And it's not surprising that Bush's most grandiloquent champions would now suffer the pain of disappointment. Perhaps it was inevitable. There's no way that any leader could possibly meet these high expectations over an eight-year administration. Besides, the cult of Bush required reality to be bent quite heavily.
But, for many conservatives, the current bout of Bush hatred is nothing new. They have felt it themselves for many years. A month before the Republican convention, Andrew Ferguson wrote in The Weekly Standard, "[W]e'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing." But instead of voicing their anxieties about Bush, these conservatives suppressed their feelings for fear of suffering retribution from the White House and the conservative press. And this suppression, in turn, seems to have exacerbated their feeling of alienation.
The best guide to this critique can be found in the writings of the two most incisive conservative columnists: Ramesh Ponnuru and George Will. Writing about Bush's big-government conservatism in National Review two years ago, Ponnuru argued: "More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton." And it wasn't just the spending that irked. Well before Harriet Miers, Ponnuru delivered a long list of ideological betrayals: from the imposition of steel tariffs to new accounting regulations to the creation of a new Cabinet department.
Will's columns have hinted at a second, albeit less widely articulated, source of ideological unhappiness. By attempting to remake the Middle East, the administration has embraced a project so utopian and ambitious that it transgresses every principle of Burkean conservatism. Will especially warned against transforming the political culture of the region. In May 2004, he quoted Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous dictum: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."
The widespread conservative discomfort with the Bush domestic agenda and the Iraq war has yet to bubble over. But the Miers debate gives every reason to believe that it will. Watching conservative bloggers and columnists join the Miers controversy has provided an important object lesson in social anthropology. After years of eviscerating every critic of Bush, sites like The Corner have followed their herd mentality in the exact opposite direction. (Only now that The Corner has plunged into this internecine warfare, which happens to jibe with the political interests of liberals, its atmosphere gets roundly described as intellectually honest.)
That's what should make the spectacle of the past week so troubling to the Bush administration. It has depended on orthodoxy within the movement to suppress complaints. But now that discipline has broken down. The conservative movement increasingly resembles a dictator's palace in the midst of a coup. Comrades have begun turning on one another with incredible fervor, as the widely ridiculed Bush apologist Hugh Hewitt will now surely attest. These days, you never know who will get dragged out and shot next. Since so many nagging complaints have festered for so long, it will surely get even uglier.
tnr.com
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New at Reason
Why aren't conservatives reading George W.'s lips anymore? Julian Sanchez interprets.
Posted by Tim Cavanaugh at October 11, 2005 04:48 PM
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Comments
Let's see…
Humble foreign policy
Steel tariffs
Farm Bill
Weapons of mass destruction
Axis of Evil
TSA
Yellowcake
Troops needed for Iraq occupation "Way off the mark"
"$400 billion" prescription drug bill
Abu Ghraib
Guantanamo
Patriot Act
Raich v Ashcroft
FEMA
You know, we can trust him. We can trust him to be a fucking lowlife lying scumbag 100% of the time.
Comment by: Warren at October 11, 2005 04:59 PM |
