President Bush's Last Press Conference

I caught a good deal of it yesterday morning, and there were a couple bits I wanted to comment on:

Q — that you think the Republican Party needs to be more inclusive. Who needs to hear that message inside the Republican Party?

THE PRESIDENT: You see, I am concerned that, in the wake of the defeat, that the temptation will be to look inward and to say, well, here’s a litmus test you must adhere to.

This party will come back. But the party’s message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party. And — take, for example, the immigration debate. That’s obviously a highly contentious issue. And the problem with the outcome of the initial round of the debate was that some people said, well, Republicans don’t like immigrants. Now, that may be fair or unfair, but that’s what — that’s the image that came out.

And, you know, if the image is we don’t like immigrants, then there’s probably somebody else out there saying, well, if they don’t like the immigrants, they probably don’t like me, as well. And so my point was, is that our party has got to be compassionate and broad-minded.

I remember the 1964 elections. My dad happened to be running for the United State Senate then and, you know, got landslided with the Johnson landslide in the state of Texas. But it wasn’t just George Bush who got defeated; the Republican Party was pretty well decimated at the time. At least that’s what they — I think that’s how the pundits viewed it. And then ’66 there was a resurgence. And the same thing can happen this time, but we just got to make sure our message is broad-gauged and compassionate; that we care about people’s lives, and we’ve got a plan to help them improve their lives.

After watching the presser, I headed off to work an on the radio was Laura Ingraham – I highly respect this lady for the passion of her address and the good humor with which she approaches issues, but as regards President Bush and immigration, the good lady goes a bit bonkers. One of the first questions which came to my mind as the rant about how President Bush mucked up immigration reform spilled from the radio was, “so, you think you’re going to get a better deal under Obama?”.

For full disclosure, I was one of the baker’s dozen or so people who backed the Bush immigration plan – and I fully understand the ire of people concerning the flood of illegals which walked across our borders over the past 20 years. But, then again, we pretty much did everything but send them an engraved invitation – to fault President Bush, decades into the problem, for not rounding up 12 million or so people and deporting them was asinine…and if we get past the deportation issue, then there remains the problem of what to do with the people who are here. Call it amnesty if you want, but President Bush was on the right track, and it would have done four things:

1. Stopped the flow of illegals as there would be no reason to be an illegal anymore.

2. Brought illegals into the legitimate economy where they can properly pay taxes and have health insurance, etc and thus stop burdening the taxpayers.

3. Ended the issue and not left it for Obama and his liberal Democrats to work out a new comprehensive “reform” which will be amnesty, pure and simple.

4. It would have made the GOP the party which did the right thing vis a vis our largest and fastest growing ethnic group, hispanics. That right there was about 2 million votes lost for the GOP – if you figure on what GW managed to pull in 2004 and what McCain pulled in 2008. Not enough, in and of itself, to tip the election back to us, but anyone who wants to throw away 2 million votes just to be an immigration purist is a fool.

In the larger sense, what the conservative complaints about President Bush boiled down to was a carp about President Bush not adhering to a purely Reaganite line…but, then again, neither did Reagan. And don’t you see? You can’t just follow the script – you sometimes have to do what you think is best, even if its not ideologically pure. Too often we on the right over the past 10 years have shot ourselves in the foot because we insisted on making the perfect the enemy of the good. Liberals do this, too – and, indeed, they do it more than we do (it takes a real fanatic, for instance, to argue against the Born Alive Act) – but because they are fools doesn’t mean we have to be, too. What I’m saying here, fellow conservatives, is to remember that politics is the art of the possible.

Then there’s this bit:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, in recent days, there’s been a fair amount of discussion in legal circles about whether or not you might give preemptive pardons, pardons in advance, to officials of your administration who engaged in anything from harsh interrogation tactics to perhaps dismissing U.S. attorneys. I’d like to know, have you given any consideration to this? And are you planning on it?

THE PRESIDENT: I won’t be discussing pardons here at this press conference.

The translation of the question: “Are you going to pardon all the war criminals in your Administration?”. Deftly handled, and then President Bush graciously allowed the reporter (from the New York times, naturally) to have a second go at it:

Q And I’m not trying to play “gotcha,” but I wonder, when you look back over the long arc of your presidency, do you think, in retrospect, that you have made any mistakes? And if so, what is the single biggest mistake that you may have made?

THE PRESIDENT: Gotcha. I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a “Mission Accomplished” on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.

I’ve thought long and hard about Katrina — you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The problem with that and — is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission. And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, how could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?

I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the ’04 elections was a mistake. I should have argued for immigration reform. And the reason why is, is that — you know, one of the lessons I learned as governor of Texas, by the way, is legislative branches tend to be risk-adverse. In other words, sometimes legislatures have the tendency to ask, why should I take on a hard task when a crisis is not imminent? And the crisis was not imminent for Social Security as far as many members of Congress was concerned.

As an aside, one thing I proved is that you can actually campaign on the issue and get elected. In other words, I don’t believe talking about Social Security is the third rail of American politics. I, matter of fact, think that in the future, not talking about how you intend to fix Social Security is going to be the third rail of American politics.

One thing about the presidency is that you can make — only make decisions, you know, on the information at hand. You don’t get to have information after you’ve made the decision. That’s not the way it works. And you stand by your decisions, and you do your best to explain why you made the decisions you made.

There have been disappointments. Abu Ghraib obviously was a huge disappointment during the presidency. Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment. I don’t know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn’t go according to plan, let’s put it that way.

Anyway, I think historians will look back and they’ll be able to have a better look at mistakes after some time has passed. Along Jake’s question, there is no such thing as short-term history. I don’t think you can possibly get the full breadth of an administration until time has passed: Where does a President’s — did a President’s decisions have the impact that he thought they would, or he thought they would, over time? Or how did this President compare to future Presidents, given a set of circumstances that may be similar or not similar? I mean, there’s — it’s just impossible to do. And I’m comfortable with that.

In a nutshell, that is the description of what being President is like – the attempt to make the right decisions with the full knowledge that no matter what you do, there is always a way to second guess it later and, additionally, there will always be critics. Fortunately for himself – and for us – President Bush is a very centered and reasonable man who is upheld in his day to day living by faith in God. After 8 years of being through the meatgrinder of American politics and having the most wickedly false slanders launched against him, he’s still the same man who came to town…gracious, thoughtful and unwilling to get into a pissing match with those who hammered him for years.

In a way, I already miss President Bush – he’s still in office, but of course its more the illusion of a Presidency at this point…unless there’s a crisis, there will be no further call for President Bush, and even if there is a crisis he’ll have the wisdom to immediately bring Obama in and not make any decisions without his knowledge and consent, given that whatever decisions are made now will be carried through by Obama, for good or ill. I’m going to miss him more as time goes on – and unless Obama turns out to be all I don’t expect him to be, the whole nation and the whole world will come to miss him, too.

Obama's Terrorist Emancipation Proclamation

Obama deludes himself by thinking he comes even close to comparing with Abraham Lincoln, but I guess there is an interesting comparison to be made… 

Abraham Lincoln, as we all know, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in confederate states. Barack Obama want to sign an executive order (which we may as well call the Terrorist Emancipation Proclamation) to shut down the Guantanamo Bay military prison, where  hundreds of captured al Qaeda terrorists are incarcerated… a priority so important to him, he may do so on his first day of power.

President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to issue an executive order his first week in office — and perhaps his first day — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to two presidential transition team advisers.

It’s unlikely the detention facility at the Navy base in Cuba will be closed anytime soon. In an interview last weekend, Obama said it would be “a challenge” to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration. 

Looks like al Qaeda will have an ally in the Oval Office starting January 20th.

Obama The Socialist Picked A Socialist Climate Czar

Looks like birds of a feather do flock together.

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization’s action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Obama, who has said action on climate change would be a priority in his administration, tapped Mrs. Browner last month to fill a new position as White House coordinator of climate and energy policies. The appointment does not need Senate confirmation. 

Obama himself was once a member of the Socialist New Party. So really, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.

President Bush's Excellent Foreign and Security Policy Legacy

Peter Brookes gives a run-down of it all, while a sample will do to cause our local liberals to have conniption fits:

US-India relations are better than ever due to Bush administration efforts. Even Pakistan is doing a better job recently in fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in its border areas with Afghanistan.

Today, Afghanistan is a lot better off: more than 30 million Afghans no longer labor under terrorist Taliban rule. Healthcare access is up; child mortality is down. Six million kids go to school, including nearly 2 million girls who would not otherwise be allowed to.

In Europe, the Bush administration led a charge for NATO expansion, bringing seven former Warsaw Pact enemies into the democratic transatlantic alliance.

The Bush White House also oversaw Kosovo’s transition to independence from Serbia, helping to start to close a chapter in the Balkan’s long, bloody history.

In the Middle East, Lebanon no longer labors under the yoke of Syrian domination, which ended its occupation after almost 30 years. In Iraq, nearly 30 million people are no longer subject to Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.

The surge of American troops into Iraq has left al Qaeda there battered, bewildered and in retreat in what Osama bin Laden said would be the decisive battle in its global jihad. While still dangerous, al Qaeda has suffered a stinging blow.

In Latin America, US ally Colombia has prospered under Washington’s “Plan Colombia,” a counter-drug and -terrorism program. The narco-terrorist group FARC is reeling from the pressure applied to it by Bogota – with U.S. assistance.

Obama does have the hard task of winding up Iraq and securing final victory in Afghanistan, but if he merely carries forward President Bush’s foreign and security policies, then the United States – and the world – will reap massive benefits. Obama’s apparent desire to open direct talks with Hamas (as if one should open up direct talks with the Gestapo, or the Mafia) is worrisome, but to be expected in a liberal, Democratic Administration. Hopefully, such things will wind up no more than kook left window dressing on what is really no more than Bush, Continued in our policies abroad.

To be sure, President Bush leaves office a man disliked by many, reviled by some – and deeply loved by those of us who, perhaps, have taken the time to see what a burden he’s been under especially since 9/11. For us, the end of the Bush era is a sad time – we’re losing a President we can count on, and we’re getting a President who is an unknown quantity. Hopefully Obama will work out ok, but we suspect that within a very few months we’ll all be longing for the crisp, decisive nature of Bush policy.

For now, there isn’t much left to be said – those who hate President Bush will go on hating him simply because they are afraid to rethink their views. Only by the very grace of God can a person who has done wrong willingly come to the admission of error, and be willing to acknowledge such errors in public. Those of us who admire the President will continue to do so – and won’t have anything nagging at our conscience. President Bush did what he thought was best; he made some errors; we backed him because he was mostly doing the exact right thing, while the errors were understandable in the context of the time.

Here is where we’re supposed to say that our sights are to be set on the future – but Christians know better than that; now, like all times, is the time to look at the problems of today and deal with them as best we can. Yesterday can’t be mended, tomorrow might never come. As the Obama Presidency starts to unfold, we’ll deal with it day by day – we (meaning the overall conservative movement) will advise, admonish and, at times, pull our hair out in frustration, but we must never fall in to the poisonous hatred the left has about President Bush. Obama is just a man, and he won’t be there forever – this, too, shall pass…and one day it will be liberals writing about Obama as we conservatives prepare for our guy (or gal, as the case may be) to take office.

Iowahawk Strikes Again

With a year-in-review of 2009 (work with me here, people):

JANUARY

Barack Obama makes history as the first African-American sworn in as President of the United States; Invoking legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, promises America “nine years of economic depression, four years of world war, eventual nuking of Japan”

Obama supporters left disappointed as oceans remain at static levels, planet fails to heal self, Dow drops below zero

Read the whole thing for your morning chuckle.

Obama Buys Defective Dog

And makes the cover of American Dog. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, there is a magazine called that. Yes, Obama is on the cover. And, yes, he did buy a three legged “rescue” dog – which is, really, mighty nice of him…but, for crying out loud, do we need Obama’s face literally everywhere? I start seeing him on Stalinesque billboards around town and I’m starting a revolution…

Global Warming Update

Well, well, well – who woulda thunk it?

Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.

Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

Each year, millions of square kilometers of sea ice melt and refreeze. However, the mean ice anomaly — defined as the seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000, varies much more slowly. That anomaly now stands at just under zero, a value identical to one recorded at the end of 1979, the year satellite record-keeping began.

Guess Obama wasn’t kidding – elect him and the world will start to cure itself out of sheer hope-n-changeness…

Anthropogenic global warming isn’t happening. It wasn’t happening. It never will happen. Its simply not possible with our puny resources to change global climate which involves materials so vast and so far spread out and containing in it an incalculable number of variables which change every freakin’ minute. I thought you liberals were the humble ones who respect Nature and understand how small Man is in relation to it? Did you forget that bit? Did Al Gore hypnotize you like one of the chickens he used to choke?

Enough of this nonsense, already.

Obama's Preemptive Excuses For His Failures

Barack Obama was not one to hold back on doom & gloom characterizations of the economy, so why is it that only now he’s saying all the hope and change he promised will have to be scaled back?

[Comrade] Barack Obama said reviving the U.S. economy will require scaling back on his campaign promises and personal sacrifice from all Americans.

“I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program broadcast this morning. “Everybody’s going to have to give.”

Obama also said in the interview recorded yesterday that he wants stricter guidelines and greater transparency in spending the remaining $350 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. 

It is amazing how different campaign promises are from reality… especially for Barack Hussein Obama. His “hope and change” is looking a lot more like “nope and more of the same.”  It seems like we’re hearing a lot of preemptive excuses being given to explain why Obama is ultimately going to be a huge failure.

The Return of European Anti-Semitism

Mark Steyn gives us a sad catalog of recent outrages:

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews;” in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, the congregation at a Swedish synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in; in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store; in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a Belgian synagogue; in Antwerp, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

In London, the police advise British Jews to review their security procedures because of potential revenge attacks.

As Steyn has pointed out elsewhere, if you think this is bad, just wait until Moslems make up 25% of the European population. At that point, European Jews will be lucky if they are only forced into Ghettos. My advice to European Jews: get out, now. Europe has lost the will to live and they will buy an extra decade of peace with your lives, if that proves necessary (and it will, if the Islamo-fascists have their way about it). The reason the EU is strangely silent about Hamas atrocities and eager with denunciations of Israel’s measured and proportionate response is because there are a lot more Moslems in Europe than there are Jews. Period. End of story.

This isn’t the return of the old anti-Semitism – not a return to the anti-Semitism which ranged from mere social inconvenience to Jews (such as, for most countries, an inability of Jews to join the Navy due to “dietary issues”) up to the pogroms of Czarist Russia. No, this is a return to the Hitlerian nightmare where the Jews are not just singled out as an enemy, but singled out as those who’s death will make for heaven on earth. Six decades after Europe said “never again!”, we’re on the verge of another Holocaust, and only the United States stands as a bulwark for the Jews of Europe and the Middle East against massacre.

There is a lesson to be taken here – that when a society cuts itself off from its wellsprings it will die via suicide and will become progressively nastier and greedier as it goes. Europe started to cut itself off from its Christian roots in the late 18th century and from that time until this, it has just gotten worse…more cruel, more base. Now the Europeans are so weak they can’t even murder on their own…but they are willing accomplices in Islamo-fascist murders of Jews. Standing in the crumbling Imperial box of Judeo-Christian civilization, the Europeans turn thumbs down to those already clawed by the lions…and they do this just to keep the lions busy and spare their own miserable lives for one more day.

Ultimately, the choice will be laid before us – to rescue the Jews, again, as well as those Europeans who have not fallen into the depths of depravity, or allow them to be murdered.

I do wonder what our choice will be?

Israel May Force Obama's Hand on Iran

Interesting news story:

President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.

How do you subtly sabotage a nuclear program? Fairly easily in a nation which is a user rather than developer of new technology. Its complex and its been done before and if you really are interested you can go dig it up. There is no way to absolutely stop Iran’s nuclear program short of regime change – and so our goal has long been to try and knock it back by ten years, and presume that within ten years the Iranian people will finally have had enough of the corrupt mullahs and there will be a revolution to bring in a more reasonable government. You can knock it back ten years by blowing it sky high, or you can sabotage it – if we’ve gone the sabotage route (and there really is no way to be certain of this from our position), then we have to award President Bush some sort of medal for this, alone: getting a CIA and larger intelligence community up to snuff enough to carry off something as complex – and dangerous – as subtle sabotage (what is subtle sabotage? Well, lets just say that un-subtle sabotage is blowing up a bridge, or some such).

This news story – which, like all MSM stories, must still be taken with a grain of salt – does explain to me why Israel hasn’t acted directly against Iran’s nuclear program. Keeping on good terms with us is vital, but stopping Iran’s nuclear program is a matter of national survival for the Israelis and if push ever comes to shove, Israel will apply whatever force proves necessary to stop Iran from deploying nuclear weapons which can hit Israel (and this is even if we extend our “nuclear umbrella” to Israel – the Israelis will be entirely unimpressed with any post-Holocaust II promise on our part to massacre those who massacred the Israelis).

Now, as to how this effects Obama – the clock is still ticking, and if Israel feels that Iran is approaching a deployable nuclear force, then Israel will insist upon US action, or will take it upon herself. Obama will send someone to talk to the Iranians – these talks will get nowhere (even if there is some sort of paper agreement signed) as the Iranian leadership is lunatic and thus will honor any agreement – if at all – only if its in their immediate interest to do so. So, talks or no talks, there might come a day – even with US sabotage slowing it down – when Iran has a credible nuclear force coming on line in the near future where Obama will have to decide to let Israel loose to destroy Iran’s nuclear program (and thus upset our applecarts in both Iraq and Afghanistan), or order a US strike to pre-empt any Israeli action.

Its going to be a thorny issue, and I hope that Obama has someone besides Hillary to lean on for advice.