Usually, I precede my posts with a quotation. Today's post is a quotation. From Mark Levin's blog, in it's entirety:
The President Is Losing Me
I guess it's legacy time over at the White House. The president is imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger now. Does the president have any conservative domestic initiatives that he's actively pursuing? If so, I'd like to know what they are. Richard Nixon tried this when his ratings were low. It didn't work.
Mr. President, the Left hated you the day you walked into the Oval Office, if not before. Their hate for you is frozen in time. If you actually believe in what you are doing, then I and many others misjudged you. You expanded the federal role in education, and we held our nose because of the war. You signed McCain-Feingold in the dead of night, and we held our nose because of the war. You expanded Medicare by adding prescription drugs, and we held our nose because of the war. You increased farm subsidies, and we held our nose because of the war.
Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security. Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy (your administration even went to the Supreme Court and argued correctly that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).
What's a conservative to do?
I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't even attempt to add anything.
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30 comments:
Shoot, it's like he's trying to be the most disliked President in history by insulting those who backed him through thick and upto the illegal alien issue.
I don't understand what the President is thinking. Well DC was a swamp so there must be something in the water.
Bush is trying to hard to please the left when what he should be doing is listening to us his constituents.
I'm not sure who is advising the President anymore but they need to have a sit down with the American people.
email isnt fast enough anymore call the White House Directly and let them know how you feel
Direct Line:
1-202-456-1111
Wait a minute. According to the left, we just back Bush no matter what! What's going on here? Could the left be wrong about this?
Seriously, I don't think he gets the concept of being a lame duck president if he's doing these things to please the left. If he really supports this kind of stuff, then he's either changed his tune or we've misjudged him.
Oh, for a true conservative!
Blimey, things must be getting bad if Mark is using 'religion' as a derogatory term!
"If he really supports this kind of stuff, then he's either changed his tune or we've misjudged him."
Could it be that he's no "conservative" at all? He's just an opportunist following a Neo-Con agenda?
Like the Left has been saying for years now?
Liam. Don't make the mistake of confusing religion with Christianity. Christianity is a religion but not the only one. The dictionary defines "religion" as, among other things,
"...a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Under that definition, Islam is a religion. So is Liberalism. So is Atheism. Homosexuality can also be considered a religion in some ways.
Anyone who makes a God of anything,such as Global warming, is creating a religion, and I will make derogatory comments about any religion that isn't a Christian one.
There have been things that Bush has done in the past that I have questioned and downright disagreed with, such as the Dubai Ports deal, and what I consider his over spending. I've always considered Bush to be more left than I would prefer, but he is really pandering to them now, and I fear it will backfire on the Republicans in the upcoming Presidential election.
Dan, I know this is off topic, but I feel a need to respond to your response to me over at ER's place. I have shaken the dust off my shoes over there for obvious reasons so I will no longer comment over there.
And you apparently have stopped blogging at your own place.
This is my response: Dan, if you want to comment on my comment I would appreciate it if you would respond to the entire comment, and not take parts of it out of context. I never said I was perfect. In fact, I admitted that I place other things above God on ocassion, so your response to me was disengenuous at best, and intentionally insulting at worst.
LOL! Mark, don’t worry, I’m well aware that Christianity is not the only religion. Actually I usually find, it’s not the atheists but the adherents who believe that there is only one religion! ;o)
I actually read ‘religion’ in the article as meaning ‘belief not based on verifiable proof’, which is typically the claim made by people who don’t want to admit to man’s exacerbation of the phenomenon, not as meaning ‘something to be worshipped.’ Anyone who makes a religion out of global warming deserves all the derogatory comments and ridicule they receive; life makes a whole lot more sense when you just stick to the facts.
"Bush to be more left than I would prefer, but he is really pandering to them now"
But this is my point. Bush is NOT pandering to the Left with these policies you dislike. He's doing what his corporate bosses want him to do.
You should know by now that Bush doesn't give a hoot about the Left - it's one of the things that endears him to the Right.
Bush was put in office by the NeoCons and is implementing policies for their pleasure.
"And you apparently have stopped blogging at your own place."
??
I have a new post up every 3-4 days.
As to not responding to your comment... this will seem odd here, since it's totally off-topic, but:
I was responding to your comment. I understand fully that you don't think you're perfect. BUT the implication of those who say that you have to be right on every sin in order to be saved is that either
1. You think you're always right or
2. None of us can be saved.
Obviously, we all know that we're not always right so that's not a possibility. But we believers here DO believe we can be saved.
So what I was trying to point out was that the case being made by the fundies over at ER's and EL's place is not one that even the fundies believe.
Is that making sense?
If you'd like, I'll take up this topic again soon on my blog and you can address it there.
dan--
I'm not certain in what sense Bush is a neoconservative beyond his efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Neoconservatives, for example, believe in free markets, unlike the old paleocons who have more trust in protectionism and the welfare state. Bush created the largest health care entitlement since LBJ and passed No Child Left Behind, a federal intrusion into state and local governments.
The Democrats tacitly support this nonsense, though they will never openly give Bush credit for compromising with them. That is why it is so frustrating watching Bush try to appeal to you people over and over and over and over again. Bush is showing love to the people who hate him, and it is hard to figure out why. I can't think of a single liberal who changed his mind about Bush because of his many unnecessary compromises.
liam--
Global warming preaches a set of beliefs that offer self-sacrifice, personal redemption, saints (including the Goracle), the Garden of Eden (the noble savage), the original sin (private property), worship of the poor and the ignorant, sacred texts, prophecies of the always imminent capitalist apocalypse, and a socialist heaven on earth.
Is Global Warming^tm a religion? You bet.
Well, Dan, when I click on your name and then on the link to your blog, I am linked to "A Payne Hollow Visit" with only one post, and that is a test post you made back in February.
Holy crap!
This is all related to the New Blogger changeover. For a while, I lost access to my real blog
www.paynehollow.blogspot.com
and so I created that test blog, but then I got access back to the real blog, but apparently this stupid login is still referring to the new, empty blog.
ARRRRGGGH.
Stupid blogger.
What took you so long?
If you guys think he's catering to the left, you're crazy -- he hasn't lifted a finger for us.
If he's pissing you guys off, take it at face value, and stop blame the left for everything, even you're rightwing disillusionment with Bush.
Mudkitty,
I think now it's pretty plain. You're just goofy. Jason mentioned two center-left ideas he's pushed and today they're talking about him doing some Global Warming crap. Add to that the alleged immigration reform bill, and you're talkin' plenty o non-conservative stuff. So if you're too much into the catnip to notice, he's done plenty that should make lefties happy.
Jason, if you know people who actually think like that, then go ahead and ridicule them. No-one in their right mind worships ignorance or poverty. There are no sacred texts; everything can be superseded. And the study of changes in global climate does not speak at all to the pros or cons of owning property or the worth of a particular economic system, nor does it offer any kind of personal redemption. It sounds to me like you are meaning a cult of personality built up around the opinions of one or more of the talking heads.
We kicked out GW's Dad when he lied to us ONE TIME in favor of a dude who lied to us ALL THE TIME--because we need consistency in our governors. GW will now fade away into history just like his Dad in the eyes of right thinking Americans because of these desperate attempts to find his Leagacy...
This thing represents, again, the stunning difference between Democrats and Republicans. When Republican leaders do stupid things, we strenuously object.
When Democrat leaders do stupid things, they are embraced and supported by their party.
Mark, even when you're on to something reasonable, you have to say stupid s--t like this. Incredible.
"This thing represents, again, the stunning difference between Democrats and Republicans. When Republican leaders do stupid things, we strenuously object.
"When Democrat leaders do stupid things, they are embraced and supported by their party."
I'll bet you get up every morning, line up four or five newspapers -- and refuse to read them. I can't account for your audacious dislays of ignorance any other way.
Then, there's this:
Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT
What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."
Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.
They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!
If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com
ER you said, "Mark, even when you're on to something reasonable, you have to say stupid s--t like this. Incredible"...
What you say is reasonable is the fact that I posted an article that disagrees with Bush. What you think is stupid, is that I pointed out the fact that Republicans don't always agree with their leaders, and Democrats always do. no matter how outrageous. Does the name William Jefferson ring a bell?
Your partisanship is showing yet again.
But I'll give you some unsolicited advice:
I have promised that I won't be reading your blog anymore, (that's the reference to shaking the dust off my shoes I made over at your place after you rejected my olive branch and then proceeded to insult me further) so you may avail yourself of your right to reciprocate in kind. It won't hurt my feelings (as if you care whether you do or not). You are always welcome to comment on my blog, but don't feel you need to.
Hey, here's an example of Democrats always agreeing with their leaders! Not.
You stand corrected, Mark.
Wanted: A War of Words
By Joan Vennochi
Boston Globe Columnist
June 3, 2007
IF YOU can't face the bad boys of Fox News, how can you face the bad boys of Iraq or Iran?
Joe Biden wins this debate on style and substance before it even takes place.
The Delaware senator and presidential candidate said he will participate in a Fox News Channel debate in the fall, despite demands from liberal groups like Moveon.org that he back out of it.
That leaves Biden, former senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio as the only three Democrats committed to attending the forum scheduled for Sept. 23 in Detroit.
Even the event's cosponsor, the Congressional Black Caucus, isn't lure enough for five other Democrats who are running for president. Senators Hillary Clinton of New York, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, and Barack Obama of Illinois, and former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, and Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico have all turned down Fox.
Note that Clinton didn't turn down Rupert Murdoch -- whose media empire includes the Fox News Channel -- when he threw a fund-raiser for her Senate reelection bid. That was symbolism she couldn't afford.
"For me, it's basic. I get elected because the African-American community supports me. . . . To say no to them, I don't get it," Biden said.
Besides, Biden added, he goes on Fox "to be the other voice. . . . To fight back. I'm tired of Democrats not fighting back."
Edwards, the first to back out of the debate, is the only candidate to give an official reason. His campaign said Fox programming tilts too much to the right.
So now, he and the other presidential candidates aren't just tilting to the left. They are genuflecting.
Assuming a down-on-their-knees position may feel good for the moment. But in the long run, it only gives the right wing fodder to use against the Democrats' quest to regain the White House.
This marriage to left wing advocacy groups will hurt them in the general election -- the GOP will make sure of that. In 1988, George H. W. Bush taunted Michael Dukakis as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU." In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee will taunt his opponent as a puppet of Moveon.org.
"We feel like you have to accept the fact that Fox is a major news organization in this country. You have to be able to walk into the lion's den," said Biden adviser Larry Rasky.
Besides, said Rasky, "The Congressional Black Caucus is as important a constituency as you have. Who are we to say 'no' [to them]? . . . When did we become the arbiter of good taste? People are watching. We have to make our case to them."
Rasky said Moveon.org put out an e-mail asking their members to call upon Biden to drop out of the debate. In response, the Biden campaign put out a statement saying it wished Moveon.org would express as much concern about getting Democrats to participate in a debate on the Iraq war as it is about getting Democrats to back out of the Fox debate.
This is a reference to a June 6 Iraq-only debate that The Financial Times and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies are trying to stage. Biden agreed to participate, but other campaigns have been ducking a commitment. Biden said he is the only Democrat who has an answer for the question "Now what?" regarding Iraq.
Of course, Biden needs all the media exposure he can get. He is not leading any polls anywhere. When it comes to invitations, he can't be as selective or arrogant -- choose your adjective -- as Clinton, Obama or Edwards. He has less to lose by giving specific answers to tough questions about Iraq or other thorny policy issues.
But deciding when and whether to answer tough questions shouldn't be a matter of political strategy, especially when it comes to the Iraq war. Sooner or later, the leading Democrats in the presidential race will have to say more about the war than simply stating opposition to it.
The presidential race is too long, and it is overrun by too many photo ops and press releases. But from the people's perspective, there can't be too many debates. The debate forum is where the candidate finally steps away from the consultant, opens his or her mouth, and speaks sense or gibberish. A friendly or hostile audience can tell the difference.
Besides, where does this all lead? If Democrats say no to Fox, does that mean Republicans will say no to CNN? Maybe they can all agree to go on "American Idol." Then again, when it comes to bad boys, Idol judge Simon Cowell beats out Fox's Bill O'Reilly.
Hey, The Republican Party has always paid lip service to small government and the religious right, but in reality they are the party of Multi/International Big Business.
Oh c'mon, ER. Yeah, Biden is just SO BOLD! What a rebel!
If you wanted to show that Dems do sometimes go against the party, your best example is either Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman. But a pathetic attempt by a losing candidate to speak into any microphone offered to him? I'm surprised you're not embarrassed to use this goof to prove your point.
I've never voted for him. The Bush boys have a fatal flaw. They believe that if they are fair, honorable and civil with their opponents, the opposition will act the same. Liberals are incapable of fairness, honor or civility. They stab him in the back and then blame him for the blood on the carpet. I'm not saying he shouldn't be fair, honorable, and civil. I'm saying he should do it with his back to a wall. As we have seen in the War on Terror, there is no way to reason with people who only want your destruction.
"Liberals are incapable of fairness, honor or civility," the conservative said with all fairness, honor and civility.
It's clear that Biden just wants to come to the party, and doesn't expect to win, so you can expect him to be able to throw a few bombs. He may just be the designated bomb thrower.
Been over him for a while. I'd still like to go fishing with him sometime, but's he's not exactly ringing my bell politically.
Jenn, when did Biden ever ring your bell? Or are you talking about Bush? Surely you voted for him. And as a result, you got 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Immigration Bill. Enjoy.
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