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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (539667)	2/13/2004 2:07:40 AM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bushspeeek continually getting him in trouble....he can't talk and it's all too obvious when you TRY to read what he said to Russert.....grade school grammar and constant repitition UPDATE - Bush aide seeks to stem damage over exporting jobs Thursday February 12, 7:39 pm ET By Adam Entous (Recasts throughout with Mankiw letter) WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - Under pressure from fellow Republicans to defuse an election-year controversy, one of President George W. Bush's top economic advisers said on Thursday he did not mean to praise the shifting of U.S. jobs abroad. The chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, issued what amounts to a public apology after Bush expressed concern in a speech in Pennsylvania about "people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas." "My lack of clarity left the wrong impression that I praised the loss of U.S. jobs," Mankiw said in a letter to House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert. An Illinois Republican, Hastert joined Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail in criticizing Mankiw for saying "outsourcing" by U.S. companies was "something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run." "It is regrettable whenever anyone loses a job. A job loss is always an awful experience and can lead to hardship for a worker and his or her family ... I regret that I did not express my views on these issues of great concern more clearly," Mankiw said. A spokeswoman said the letter was Mankiw's idea, not the White House's. "He believed it was an important opportunity to clarify his views," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said. With concern about unemployment heating up ahead of the November presidential election, Democrats have seized on Mankiw's comments and the council's annual report as evidence the Bush White House is insensitive to the plight of out-of-work Americans. LABOR COSTS They accused Mankiw -- and the White House -- of encouraging companies to move operations to places like Mexico, India and China, where labor costs are lower. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle derided what he called "Alice in Wonderland economics" and predicted Mankiw would quit. Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York told reporters, "This is the economic report of the president and not the economic report of Mr. Mankiw ... We cannot allow our Republican friends to shift the blame and the burden to Mr. Mankiw." Hastert said of Mankiw: "His theory fails a basic test of real economics." Bush himself sought to stem the controversy during a visit on Thursday to a high school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania -- a pivotal state in this year's election and one of the hardest hit by factory job losses during his presidency. Without mentioning Mankiw by name, Bush said, "I don't worry about numbers, I worry about people." "There are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas," Bush added. "We need to act to make sure there are more jobs at home" by retraining displaced workers and by making his tax cuts permanent. The Republican president offered no new initiatives to curb outsourcing and aides said he opposed restrictions on free trade. Senate Democrats introduced legislation requiring companies that export American jobs to first give their employees and affected communities fair warning. Nearly 2.8 million factory jobs have been lost since Bush took office and the issue looms large ahead of November's vote, where victory in rust-belt states like Pennsylvania could be key. Underscoring its political importance to Bush's re-election, Thursday's presidential visit was his 25th to Pennsylvania. He narrowly lost the state in the 2000 election, and analysts say he may have hurt his chances this year when he scrapped U.S. tariffs on steel imports in December to avert a trade war with Europe. (Additional reporting by Randall Mikkelsen)

To: PartyTime who wrote (539667)	2/13/2004 8:24:36 AM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

George W. Bush -- grand strategist By Tony Blankley THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Boston Globe — the respected, liberal newspaper owned by the New York Times — ran an article last week that Bush critics may wish to read carefully. It is a report on a new book that argues that President Bush has developed and is ably implementing only the third American grand strategy in our history. The author of this book, "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience" (Harvard Press) to be released in March, is John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University. The Boston Globe describes Mr. Gaddis as "the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians." In other words, this is not some put-up job by an obscure right-wing author. This comes from the pinnacle of the liberal Ivy League academic establishment. If you hate George W. Bush, you will hate this Boston Globe story because it makes a strong case that Mr. Bush stands in a select category with presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and James Monroe (as guided by his secretary of state, John Q. Adams) in implementing one of only three grand strategies of American foreign policy in our two-century history. As the Globe article describes in an interview with Mr. Gaddis: "Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country's mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries of policy." According to this analysis, the first grand strategy by Monroe/Adams followed the British invasion of Washington and the burning of the White House in 1814. They responded to that threat by developing a policy of gaining future security through territorial expansion — filling power vacuums with American pioneers before hostile powers could get in. That strategy lasted throughout the 19th and the early 20th centuries, and accounts for our continental size and historic security. FDR's plans for the post-World War II period were the second grand strategy and gained American security by establishing free markets and self-determination in Europe as a safeguard against future European wars, while creating the United Nations and related agencies to help us manage the rest of the world and contain the Soviets. The end of the Cold War changed that and led, according to Mr. Gaddis, to President Clinton's assumption that a new grand strategy was not needed because globalization and democratization were inevitable. "Clinton said as much at one point. I think that was shallow. I think they were asleep at the switch," Mr. Gaddis observed. That brings the professor to George W.Bush, who he describes as undergoing "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V." Clearly, Mr. Gaddis has not been a long-time admirer of Mr. Bush. But he is now. He observes that Mr. Bush "undertook a decisive and courageous reassessment of American grand strategy following the shock of the 9/11 attacks. At his doctrine's center, Bush placed the democratization of the Middle East and the urgent need to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting nuclear weapons. Bush also boldly rejected the constraints of an outmoded international system that was really nothing more that a snapshot of the configuration of power that existed in 1945." It is worth noting that John Kerry and the other Democrats' central criticism of Mr. Bush — the prosaic argument that he should have taken no action without U.N. approval — is rejected by Mr. Gaddis as being a proposed policy that would be constrained by an "outmoded international system." In assessing Mr. Bush's progress to date, the Boston Globe quotes Mr. Gaddis: "So far the military action in Iraq has produced a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue within the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates. The United States has emerged as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001." In another recent article, written before the Iraqi war, Mr. Gaddis wrote: "[Bush's] grand strategy is actually looking toward the culmination of the Wilsonian project of a world safe for Democracy, even in the Middle East. And this long-term dimension of it, it seems to me, goes beyond what we've seen in the thinking of more recent administrations. It is more characteristic of the kind of thinking, say, that the Truman administration was doing at the beginning of the Cold War." Is Mr. Bush becoming an historic world leader in the same category as FDR, as the eminent Ivy League professor argues? Or is he just a lying nitwit, as the eminent Democratic Party Chairman and Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe argues? I suspect that as this election year progresses, that may end up being the decisive debate. You can put me on the side of the professor. washtimes.com