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Rewriting the Bush Legacy? Already???
By Brian | February 8, 2009 | Share on Facebook
You know, George W. Bush told us all that history would judge him differently after he left office. I had sort of assumed he meant more than three weeks after he left, though.
First, Jeff Porten tells me that NPR
Topics: Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
Re Afghanistan, I’ve said elsewhere that there are several dogs that aren’t barking on this topic, and I’ll be curious to see if a) this turns out to be substantively true, and b) who the unnamed sources are that NPR quoted. (And c), if we determine that this is a leak from Defense Bush holdovers to polish his image, as I suspect, whether that will have one iota of impact on NPR’s undeserved reputation as a liberal news outlet. I think I can already answer this one.)
Briefly, though, two of the dogs that aren’t barking: 1) everything I’ve ever read about the application of air power is that it can only be used to win a battle if it’s used massively and indiscriminately — e.g., firebombing of Dresden, or napalming of Vietnamese jungles. If we theorize that FATA insurgents are integrated with civilian areas, you can’t have total air destruction without massive civilian casualties. 2) No one in the Obama administration, AFAIK, is saying anything about a rapid win in Afghanistan, whereas an announcement about pulling those troops home would be very popular at the moment.
Re faith-based initiatives, the lede that you buried concerns the separation of church and state, and the lack of preferences for any one religion. There is plenty of documentation that Bush’s goals with the faith-based initiative were to push Christian and conservative values. For those of us who recall that the separation of church and state is a Constitutional issue, Obama’s policy regarding the new office is as much a “redefinition and expansion” of Bush’s idea as his policy on torture is a “redefinition and expansion” of Bush’s allowance of it.
Of course, if you want to give Obama bipartisan credit for keeping what was worthwhile about the Bush faith initiative while repudiating the 90% of it that was reprehensible, I’m not going to stop you. But a hypothetical clarification: “feed the children” is a good program, not a revision of “feed the children to the wolves.”
Re: Afghanistan – you’re instincts seem to have gotten the better of you. You’re now overtly disagreeing with your own post. Note that I remain non-commital on which Porten I agree with (like you, I don’t believe I have all the facts). My point, though, was the lack of mass rebuttal to a “things are going well” story in the media. That is a big change from before inauguration day.
Re: Faith-based initiatives, the article you link to is excellent – detailing much more clearly than I was able to my original point about the Bush administration’s inability to control the message.
That said, I can only assume it wasn’t the article you intended to link to. The word “Christian” does not appear in the article at all (the word “Catholic” appears only once, and in this context:
As for your claim that Obama’s policy is as much a redefinition/expansion of Bush’s idea as his torture policy, Obama himself has disagreed with you numerous times – both on the campaign trail and now that he’s taken office. His beef with Bush’s program was that it was under-funded, and didn’t do enough to focus on local neighborhoods, not that it was “conservative” or “Christian.” Here’s Obama from last July, as per USA Today:
To his credit, that’s exactly what he did.
I can’t tell you how disappointed your last paragraph makes me feel. Statements like “if you want to give [my preferred politician] credit for [something I believe to be incorrect], I’m not going to stop you” is precisely the kind of gamesmanship that poisoned the political dialog throughout the Bush years.
It suggests to me that you’re reflexively defending Obama and bashing Bush without a full read of the facts. And the fact that Obama agrees with me on this issue and not you backs me up on that.
You stopped giving Bush a chance early in his presidency. Obama’s giving him a chance now. Whaddayah say we join him, OK?
Lancet: I am in process of evaluating whether the sources I trusted were wrong, and how that changes my opinion. I might also have a few things to say about how my news source for learning that the Lancet study is under attack was the Brian M. Greenberg News Agency.
Faith-based initiatives: I linked to Dilulio mainly because I *love* having to look up how to spell his goddamn name every time I write it. No, that’s not it — I linked to him because he’s a Penn prof, and because as the head of the office we might be able to bypass our usual debate over the validity of our sources. The pull quote that I had in mind was this excerpt:
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