Friday, May 12, 2006

What Tics Me Off About President Bush So the polls show Bush's poll numbers are at an all time low.  This is causing some in the other party to start ordering drapes for their new majority offices.   As bad as things look if you're only looking at the mainstream media's version, is it worse than the alternative? I had this exchange on The Lunch Counter Forum last night, which brought out the most of what I am disappointed about what the Bush administration is doing. Catatonic wrote: But if things keep on track, Democrats will take control of congress and the house in 2006 and as John McCain has said, Republicans will regret all the outrageous tactics they used to dominate congress. My response: No. Not because of that. It will be because of the creation of the most unaffordable entitlement program on earth, government spending two or three times more than what it was 10 years ago, I'm guessing. I think the term 'compassionate conservative' really means 'there's no person we won't spend money on whether they need it or not.' It will be because he is ambiguous, playing the same politics that the Dems are over illegal immigration and protecting the borders. I could scream every time I hear a politician say 'we need a comprehensive plan'. That is code for 'I'm not going to secure the border until after months if not years of thoughtful consideration, if at all.' Any plan they could come up with will be a waste of time if they can't first prove that they will stop the illegal crossing of our borders in the first place. I get the impression that the pinheads in Washington want to dream up a plan that will perpetually accept border crashers rather than stop them and make them immigrate the legal way. We need to be removing all incentive for illegal aliens in terms of social welfare. Don't hire them, unless they want to work for 40 cents an hour. That's about 10 cents an hour less than what they could make in their own dam country. It will be because Bush has been sounding like a Democrat lately when it comes to energy. 'Addicted to oil' is emotional blather that could have come from any Greenpeace member, and has no place in a rational discussion of our current dependency on foreign oil. People tend to get a bit apprehensive when someone they thought they knew begins to act contrary to what the average Republican would expect. I wouldn't count your eggs before they hatch though. Because above all that, Democrats want to spend even more, want to make illegal aliens able to vote, want to repeal Bush's tax cuts, want to increase taxes to finance class warfare and income re-distribution, want to exit Iraq prematurely, don't believe that the war on terror is real, and don't believe in pre-empting terrorist attacks with all tools available (NSA projects). There's more but I'm tired... 4:52:44 PM    comment [] trackback []

Something More Than Just Dissent Today's leaks from the inside of a war effort is not just dissent, it is something else.  And that 'something else' is palatable from even the most casual observer of the mainstream medias' product. In his Opinion Journal piece, Daniel Henninger writes: Today we have neither institutional discipline nor a shared ideology. The foundational U.S. document in the war on terror is the June 2002 Bush Doctrine, a response to September 11. But here the threat itself is debated endlessly. Islamic terror has no address. Obviously swaths of the national security bureaucracy--the Pillars, Wilsons and McCarthys--not only don't buy into the Bush Doctrine but feel obliged to take their disagreements with it outside the government. Since Vietnam, a war as in Iraq is no longer a national commitment but a policy matter.  As a result, the security bureaucracies have become a confused tangle of oppositional ideas over the war in Iraq, discrete policies such as the warrantless wiretaps, and the nature of the threat from Islamic terror. Out of this confusion of policy and purpose have fallen leaks as sensitive as the al Qaeda secret prisons and as oh-golly-gee as yesterday's "leak" about the government analyzing billions of phone-call patterns to pick up terrorist activity. This Isn't Just 'Dissent'. The CIA's leakers lack the Cold Warriors' sense of purpose. [OpinionJournal.com] 7:43:52 AM    comment [] trackback []

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