Cowboy Diplomacy

Funny how he gives W a beer-gut, when he’s probably one of the fittest presidents we’ve had.

I’m quite sure he’d out-PT Barry.

I really do admire the President’s commitment to fitness. He works out an hour a day.

I’m very disappointed that he didn’t use his Bully Pulpit to motivate the nation to follow his example.

The Presidential candidate with the best health care platform was Mike Huckabee.

He was going to make physical fitness and healthy eating the cornerstone of his health care plan. This could save the treasury literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year over the coming decades. Complications of Type II diabetes and the related metabolic syndrome are already eating up enormous health care dollars, and the cost is going to explode in the coming decades. These can be largely prevented by getting the nation as a whole to adopt the President’s laudable dedication to self-maintenance.

Opportunity wasted. And now, ironically, we’ve got an incoming President who’s still got unresolved issues with cigarette smoking.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

thebronze,

It’s a cartoon, genius. And a conservative one at that. Catch a clue.

The rest of you guys,

I guess it was a slow day and you needed something to comment on.

JFK said ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’

and is saying ‘the torch had been passed to a new generation…’ Obama seems to be borrowing some phrases or sentiments

Obama said, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you’

So the cartoon is perhaps not so funny as it is realistic. What confronts any American President will also confront Barack Obama. Will he have the right stuff when things get dicey? Looks like we’re going to find out. Cowboy diplomacy has its upside.

What prestigious university did you go to Dave?

It figures that you didn’t get the joke. Not too bright, are you?

Mata,

You’re getting emotional (and personal) again. How do you know I’m an urbanite? As a matter of fact, I spent Saturday using my chainsaw to reduce the pile of fallen limbs from the last heavy snowfall. Not that that matters, but you raised the subject. Just as the poster raised the cowboy issue by placing the cartoon depicting Obama as the effete drugstore cowboy. I noticed you, like many on this site, like to dish it out, but get all outraged when someone dishes it back.

I spent a good portion of my adult life living west of the Mississippi. Real cowboys are self-reliant. You really need to learn more about GWB’s biography. He spent his entire life being covered for by his Dad and his Dad’s friends and business associates. Not that my life is a paradigm of achievement, but what I have accomplished, I accomplished on my own. Although my parents taught me great values and my father was a model of what a man should be, nobody greased the skids for me. GWB has been sliding all his life. That’s not an opinion, it’s biographical fact. And that’s my problem with GWB, not his wealth.

Mata,

Please, oh, please never get outraged at me. You rose to Bush’s defense like he was your father, son, or husband. Same thing with Joe the Plumber. What’s up with that, Mata? Why this need to defend people like a Momma Bear with her cubs?

What are in the flying hell are “urbanite views?” That’s up there with the silliest things you’ve ever said. And what does acreage have to do with living in the country? Does one have to have a “spread” to be a country person? The bottomline is you know very little about me. The meter you have is a political correctness meter that you’ve self-calibrated to your detriment. You continually make assumptions about someone from their political views, while knowing little about them.

And I nerver suggested that my achievement exceed GWB’s. Again, the faux outrage paired with a straw man argument. The difference between me and GWB is that my achievements are my own. I didn’t need Dad and his friends covering for me. I made that clear, but you blew right past it, so you could construct a straw argument and get all worked up over it.

And if I finished my Administration with our troops tied down in two countries, the economy heading for a Depression, and an approval rating in the lower quartile, I’d say I’d failed. I’d rather do a small job well, then blow a big one. We don’t know what Obama will do, but unfortunately we know what Bush has done. And yet no rest round here on the ODS. And the man hasn’t even been inaugurated yet.

Wait, an autobiography is a an unbiased account of someone’s life? In fact, it’s potentially the most biased. The facts about GWB’s life (and his Administration) are out there. That you choose to view them through rose-colored glasses doesn’t change those facts.

And keep beating that class envy thing, it’s a helpful distraction from those facts.

Mata,

Very good recitation of Republican cant, re: red vs. blue, rural and “urbanite”, real American and (I guess, “unreal”) America. Not only is that divisive at a time when Americans need to be unified, but it is losing it’s predicitve capability. If ever there were a “fly over” state, it’s Indiana.

Have you been spending time with Mike lately, Mata? The level of invective in your posts is rising. And the ratio of content to calumny is falling. You throw out insults just because they sound offensive, not because they have any connection to the comments or the commenter.

I lack “stuffing” because I accept the scientific consensus of AGW. Disagree with me all you want. But there is absolutely no connection between my character and my scientific opinions.

I’m a “whiner.” One “whines” about one’s personal life. I am very happy with mine. In fact, I’m very fortunate. But there are many who have suffered because of Bush’s ham-handed, bone-headed leadership. I’m angry about what Bush has done to this country. No, things were not rosy before, but this has been a terrible eight years. And only an unthinking or self-deceptive partisan would argue otherwise.

And if you want to see some pissed-off people full of negativity, divisiveness, and just plain mean-spirit peruse this site and then look in the mirror.

“Why not the converse: That only an unthinking or self-deceptive partisan would believe that it’s been a terrible 8 years, because of Bush?”

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

America’s historians, it seems, don’t think much of George W. Bush.

Now in all fairness, historians should wait a while before passing judgment on a president’s who served recently, much less one still in office. But the current incumbent is a special case. After all, 81 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times poll, believe he’s taken the country on the wrong track. That’s the highest number ever registered. The same poll also says 28 percent have a favorable view of his performance in office, which is also in Nixon-in-the-darkest-days-of-Watergate territory.

But, as George Mason University’s History News Network reports, the historians have a different measure. They want to stack him up against his forty-two predecessors as the nation’s chief executive. Among historians, there is no doubt into which echelon he falls–his competitors are Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce, the worst of the presidential worst. But does Bush actually come in dead last?

Yes. History News Network’s poll of 109 historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002804

Of course, these are just historians …. that want to look at this record based on the other presidents we’ve had.

Of course, the public, being less informed regarding history than professional historians isn’t too far removed from the historians perspectives on Bush’s presidency: they give it an approval rating of around 25%.

So really, on both ends, academic and not, while you might not find his presidency “terrible” you would find it ‘poor’ to ‘a failure.’

Naw, you’re just plain wrong.

The Bush-Christian-Conservativism failure is so potent it’s even brought about a schism in your own intellectual camp:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzRlMjY0YjIwMzk4MDdhOGM4YjEwNjU5ODFhN2JhOTA=

You know this too: Parker, Will, Buckley, et al simply can’t take it anymore and you are now being enveloped into echo chamber –devoid of an intellectual core. That’s what happens when you chip away, claiming bias, at the media, academics, and even the mass populace: you end up residing in an ideological cave of seclusion.

You reality-free, analysis-insulated echochamber trapped fleas always want to retreat to the future where it’s warm and cozy, and you can burrow away in your bed of ignorance, where no one can know anything about the present in evaluating Bush’s policies:

-In regard to the public: they should wait, then they will then understand.
-In regard to the academics: they should wait, then they will apologize.
-In regard to the journalists: they should wait, then they will rewrite.
-In regard to heretical republicans: they should wait, then they will repent.

Wait. Wait. …always “wait, then you will see.” You echo clones sing to the future all alike, that’s your only refuge, where you can cling on to your collapsing ideology.

But it’s our time now; you wait.

This is politics, not physics; and as such it’s bound to a perception of playing forces that dominate and subdue to further a goal, it can get be graceful or messy: For Bush it is going to be brutal.

Bush will be taken down even further; beyond the congressional turnover in 06, beyond his invisible presidency in the past campaign season, beyond his present co-presidency with Obama, and finally down to the present, removed from the future: where all his years of tricks, deception, miscalculations, and shadow dealings will be laid out for public consumption, with a clear diagonal downward slope to failure … as a president.

… and we won’t have to wait either, it’ll start soon.

“Here you go, have at it”.
—

Joe Klein, a former admirer of Bush writes today-

…
The latter has held sway these past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush’s economic team, but we have more than enough evidence to say, definitively, that at a moment when there was a vast national need for reassurance, the President himself was a cipher. Yes, he’s a lame duck with an Antarctic approval rating — but can you imagine Bill Clinton going so gently into the night? There are substantive gestures available to a President that do not involve the use of force or photo ops. For example, Bush could have boosted the public spirit — and the auto industry — by announcing that he was scrapping the entire federal automotive fleet, including the presidential limousine, and replacing it with hybrids made in Detroit. He could have jump-started — and he still could — the Obama plan by releasing funds for a green-jobs program to insulate public buildings. He could start funding the transit projects already approved by Congress.

In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1862307,00.html

Klein is still unforgivably late in taking six years to come to his senses, but, as always, better late than never.

Victor David Hanson’s attempt to hide Bush’s legacy with future historians and in a generation incapable of judgment:

George W. Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the “worst” president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as it was ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower — who had previously never been elected to anything.

As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another Sept. 11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare and federal support for schools vs. the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-to-2007 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman, Bush’s supposedly “worst” presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.

But these days even that modest assessment that things aren’t that bad — or all that different from the past — may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_11084983

… ‘an increasingly hysterical generation; ‘that’s cute! …just like ‘a generation of whiners,’ I guess.