Tag: George W. Bush

David Brooks almost gets it right

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is smart and useful in its treatment of the similarities between the national-security policies of President Obama and those of George W. Bush after 2003 (though I think a more reasonable date to pick would be 2005), and of the differences between the Bush team and Dick Cheney during the waning years of the Bush White House.

But Brooks misses entirely why Obama has been more successful in selling those policies. It’s not just that Obama is more skillful at it, and understands public leadership better than Bush ever did. More than anything, it’s that when Bush finally moved away from the abject failures of the Bush-Cheney years, they were his failures.

Bush may have begun doing the right thing — or, at least, he may have begun doing the wrong thing less often — but he no longer had any credibility. Thus, by the time Condoleezza Rice had begun moving foreign policy in a less-insane direction, Bush had already irretrievably cast himself as a malleable tool.

Nor are the choices Obama is making today — on Guantánamo, on torture photos, on military tribunals — the sorts of things that will gain any real support on their own merits. Rather, most reasonable people see them as the least-bad decisions he could make given the “mess” that he inherited from Bush, as he put it yesterday.

Again, not an argument Bush could have made.

How to avoid prosecuting Bush and Cheney

Prosecuting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others for torture-related war crimes would be madness, and President Obama clearly doesn’t want to do it. But torture is serious business. What should we do?

At ThePhoenix.com, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate shows us the way out.

The little man at the podium

.msnbcLinks {font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;} .msnbcLinks a {text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px;} .msnbcLinks a:link, .msnbcLinks a:visited {color: #5799db !important;} .msnbcLinks a:hover, .msnbcLinks a:active {color:#CC0000 !important;}

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Admit it: You didn’t watch President Bush’s farewell address. Well, I did. In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at his short, half-hearted effort at vindication and conclude that the real message is we no longer need fear the little man at the podium.

An attempted October surprise

The Bush White House, by all appearances, hasn’t made much of an effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden since that botched encounter at Tora Bora in late 2001.

Now NPR reports that the administration is going all out to get bin Laden before Bush leaves office.

If you listen to the audio version of the story, you’ll come to the inescapable conclusion that the real goal is to roll up bin Laden even earlier than that — say, a couple of weeks before Election Day.

Shameful.

The conservative case against Palin

Charles Krauthammer makes it cogently. And I’ll add this: If McCain had, say, talked Condoleezza Rice into being his running mate, don’t you think McCain could spend the rest of the campaign writing his inaugural address? Even despite her deep involvement in Bush’s failures?

A good night for the Republicans

A pretty good night for McCain. He really caught a break with President Bush, who I thought came across far better as a chief executive on the job than he would have if he’d actually been in the hall. Bush was at his charming best and stayed on message, making it about McCain instead of himself. Discordant note: his out-of-context reference to “the angry left.”

What got into Fred Thompson? If he’d been this energetic and folksy during his presidential campaign, he might have gotten someone outside his immediate family to vote for him. I agree with David Gergen, who said on CNN that Thompson was unusually effective in talking about McCain’s experience as a POW, but no doubt angered Democrats with his distortions* (my word, not Gergen’s) of Obama’s stands.

It was pretty funny to follow Thompson’s hyperpartisan attacks with Joe Lieberman’s call for bipartisanship. Lieberman was a considerable upgrade over Zell Miller, the then-Democratic senator who made a fool of himself at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Lieberman took a couple of shots at Obama, but you had to laugh with some appreciation at his success in getting Republicans to clap for the Clintons.

I also enjoyed the smirk firmly planted on Lieberman’s face as he praised Sarah Palin.

*And, as Josh Marshall points out, a damn vicious distortion in at least one case.

Kerry on fire

I’ve never seen him that impassioned on his own behalf. And if Bill Clinton was more intent on whacking Bush than McCain, Kerry made up for it. He even poked fun at himself as he ran through a litany of McCain flip-flops.

Good Jason Zengerle piece in The New Republic on Kerry’s revival as one of Obama’s most effective surrogates. If Biden falls flat tonight, remember: I told you so.