Fred Barnes: Mildly Retarded?

He sure is making the case that he is, in this, er, defense of Bush's presidency. Yeah, I read an article from the Weekly Standard. I knew it was a bad idea, and I did it anyway. Consider this my penance:

The postmortems on the presidency of George W. Bush are all wrong. The liberal line is that Bush dangerously weakened America's position in the world and rushed to the aid of the rich and powerful as income inequality worsened.

Meh, sounds about right to me.

That is twaddle.

So’s your face!

Conservatives--okay, not all of them--have only been a little bit kinder. They give Bush credit for the surge that saved Iraq, but not for much else.

Wow, I guess Bush was finally able to forge a consensus between the left and right. They agree he sucked.

He deserves better. His presidency was far more successful than not. And there's an aspect of his decision-making that merits special recognition: his courage.

Well, I guess he’s agile. That’s pretty cool. Does that count as a success?

Time and time again, Bush did what other presidents, even Ronald Reagan, would not have done and for which he was vilified and abused. That--defiantly doing the right thing--is what distinguished his presidency.

Doing things that other Presidents wouldn’t have done does not make him a good President. It probably makes him a bad President. If Presidents like Jackson or Washington or FDR or (fine) even Reagan wouldn’t do something, it probably isn’t a good idea.

Bush had ten great achievements (and maybe more) in his eight years in the White House, starting with his decision in 2001 to jettison the Kyoto global warming treaty so loved by Al Gore, the environmental lobby, elite opinion, and Europeans. The treaty was a disaster, with India and China exempted and economic decline the certain result. Everyone knew it. But only Bush said so and acted accordingly.

Well, I can’t argue with this one, agreeing to the Kyoto Accords would have been a terrible idea, it was pretty much just a bunch of countries coming together and saying “fuck you, America.” But he didn’t go far enough; yeah, he didn’t join Kyoto, but he didn’t do anything else. For rejecting Kyoto to be ruled a success, he would have needed to follow it up with something else, some other, better, environmental agreement. But he didn’t.

He stood athwart mounting global warming hysteria and yelled, "Stop!" He slowed the movement toward a policy blunder of worldwide impact, providing time for facts to catch up with the dubious claims of alarmists. Thanks in part to Bush, the supposed consensus of scientists on global warming has now collapsed. The skeptics, who point to global cooling over the past decade, are now heard loud and clear. And a rational approach to the theory of manmade global warming is possible.

And I guess this is why: he still doesn’t believe in global warming. You know who else doesn’t believe in global warming? The Russians. Some Russian scientists are claiming that we’re actually about to enter another ice age, pointing to how cyclical that has been. But, um, Russian scientists tried to make a human-ape chimera, so, well, fuck them.

Second, enhanced interrogation of terrorists. Along with use of secret prisons and wireless eavesdropping, this saved American lives. How many thousands of lives? We'll never know. But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, "Those are precisely the elements which kept us safe and which have prevented a second attack."

I’m pretty much ok with the secret prisons and the humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Seriously, fuck those guys. But domestic wiretapping? That’s such a ridiculous violation of civil liberties I can’t imagine anyone calling it a success. We can’t just ignore things like the Bill of Rights; the Taliban didn’t have a Bill of Rights either, and they’re not the best government role model.

Crucial intelligence was obtained from captured al Qaeda leaders, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with the help of waterboarding. Whether this tactic--it creates a drowning sensation--is torture is a matter of debate. John McCain and many Democrats say it is. Bush and Vice President Cheney insist it isn't.

I don’t really care about whether waterboarding is torture or not, but just looking at who believes it is, and who says it isn’t, I’m inclined to say that it just might be. Seriously, I think you could be a pretty good person if you lived your entire life doing the opposite of what Dick Cheney would do, almost like the Costanza Method.

In any case, it was necessary. Lincoln once made a similar point in defending his suspension of habeas corpus in direct defiance of Chief Justice Roger Taney. "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Lincoln asked. Bush understood the answer in wartime had to be no.

I think the biggest difference between the two was that Lincoln regretted the suspension, while Bush reveled in it.

Bush's third achievement was the rebuilding of presidential authority, badly degraded in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and Bill Clinton. He didn't hesitate to conduct wireless surveillance of terrorists without getting a federal judge's okay. He decided on his own how to treat terrorists and where they should be imprisoned. Those were legitimate decisions for which the president, as commander in chief, should feel no need to apologize.

Where Bush didn’t do enough with Kyoto, here he went too far. A strong executive branch is important, but Bush crippled the other two branches, destroying the system of checks and balances that is so important to this form of government. And that was shown to be a terrible thing with the wiretapping. Bush didn’t only decide how to treat terrorists, he also decided who was a terrorist, and that was overstepping his authority.

Defending, all the way to the Supreme Court, Cheney's refusal to disclose to Congress the names of people he'd consulted on energy policy was also enormously important. Democratic congressman Henry Waxman demanded the names, but the Court upheld Cheney, 7-2. Last week, Cheney defended his refusal, waspishly noting that Waxman "doesn't call me up and tell me who he's meeting with."

Seriously, are there more than like five people in the country that don’t think Dick Cheney is an asshole?

Achievement number four was Bush's unswerving support for Israel. Reagan was once deemed Israel's best friend in the White House. Now Bush can claim the title. He ostracized Yasser Arafat as an impediment to peace in the Middle East. This infuriated the anti-Israel forces in Europe, the Third World, and the United Nations, and was criticized by champions of the "peace process" here at home. Bush was right.

I have no problem with supporting Israel, and they’re really in a shitty situation, but unswerving? I don’t think it’s a good thing to turn a blind eye to whatever Israel does; if we’re going to support them, there should be some accountability.

He was clever in his support. Bush announced that Ariel Sharon should withdraw the tanks he'd sent into the West Bank in 2002, then exerted zero pressure on Sharon to do so. And he backed the wall along Israel's eastern border without endorsing it as an official boundary, while knowing full well that it might eventually become exactly that. He was a loyal friend.

How is this good? It seems like Sharon just did whatever the hell he felt like. That sure makes the US look good.

His fifth success was No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education reform bill cosponsored by America's most prominent liberal Democratic senator Edward Kennedy. The teachers' unions, school boards, the education establishment, conservatives adamant about local control of schools--they all loathed the measure and still do. It requires two things they ardently oppose, mandatory testing and accountability.

If all these groups are against it, groups that are often opposed, maybe it’s not the best measure.

Kennedy later turned against NCLB, saying Bush is shortchanging the program. In truth, federal education spending is at record levels. Another complaint is that it forces teachers to "teach to the test." The tests are on math and reading. They are tests worth teaching to.

Seriously, as an idea, it’s fine, but you can’t say that it hasn’t been underfunded. We may be spending more on education at a federal level than ever before, but what about local levels? This is just misdirection on the part of some neocon dipshit trying to rescue Bush’s legacy. NCLB clearly isn’t working; yeah, we’re testing math and reading, but kids aren’t exactly doing well on those tests. Seriously, kids are pretty stupid. This isn’t working.

Sixth, Bush declared in his second inaugural address in 2005 that American foreign policy (at least his) would henceforth focus on promoting democracy around the world. This put him squarely in the Reagan camp, but he was lambasted as unrealistic, impractical, and a tool of wily neoconservatives. The new policy gave Bush credibility in pressing for democracy in the former Soviet republics and Middle East and in zinging various dictators and kleptocrats. It will do the same for President Obama, if he's wise enough to hang onto it.

I’m sure this would be great if it weren’t a lie. While on the one hand Bush is supporting democracy in Georgia, he seems pretty content in dealing with a regressive monarchy in Saudi Arabia. It’s all about money, government type is irrelevant.

The seventh achievement is the Medicare prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003. It's not only wildly popular; it has cost less than expected by triggering competition among drug companies. Conservatives have deep reservations about the program. But they shouldn't have been surprised. Bush advocated the drug benefit in the 2000 campaign. And if he hadn't acted, Democrats would have, with a much less attractive result.

I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know anything about this. But you have to love the partisan hackery of assuming that Democrats would do a worse job.

Then there were John Roberts and Sam Alito. In putting them on the Supreme Court and naming Roberts chief justice, Bush achieved what had eluded Richard Nixon, Reagan, and his own father. Roberts and Alito made the Court indisputably more conservative. And the good news is Roberts, 53, and Alito, 58, should be justices for decades to come.

Ugh, I guess Bush and his acolytes would view this as a success. I think it’s more nauseating, especially Alito.

Bush's ninth achievement has been widely ignored. He strengthened relations with east Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea, Australia) without causing a rift with China. On top of that, he forged strong ties with India. An important factor was their common enemy, Islamic jihadists. After 9/11, Bush made the most of this, and Indian leaders were receptive. His state dinner for Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 was a lovefest.

Um, the US already had strong ties with all those countries. And Bush made things a hell of a lot worse with North Korea, and made Pakistan dangerously unstable. But I’m sure that was a hell of a dinner.

Finally, a no-brainer: the surge. Bush prompted nearly unanimous disapproval in January 2007 when he announced he was sending more troops to Iraq and adopting a new counterinsurgency strategy. His opponents initially included the State Department, the Pentagon, most of Congress, the media, the foreign policy establishment, indeed the whole world. This makes his decision a profile in courage. Best of all, the surge worked. Iraq is now a fragile but functioning democracy.

Um, the surge wouldn’t have even been necessary if he hadn’t fabricated reasons for going to war, and then completely botched everything that came after steamrolling the Iraqi army. Basically, Bush fucked up hardcore, repeatedly, and then did something well that brought us back to where we would have been if he had only fucked up hardcore a few times, and this guy is congratulating him for it.

How does Bush rank as a president? We won't know until he's judged from the perspective of two or three decades. Hindsight forced a sharp upgrading of the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Given his achievements, it may have the same effect for Bush.

Um, yeah, I guess hindsight is important, but if I were to guess, I would say he’s going to find himself in the company of Buchanan and Hoover, regardless of how many apologies Fred Barnes writes.