NunoftheAbove

During the eight years of Bush-42, much was made about his frequent trips to his ranch in Crawford, TX, however most of the MSM press never actually understood the appeal of the place.  Yes, the most expensive hotel room goes for $139 a night and the cost of a meal at the Coffee Station, the only restaurant in Crawford, will run less than $10 with tip, but the 90 degree plus summer days seemed to turn off many of the press corps which travel with the president.  They even ponied up $26,000 to air condition the local school gym which became the press briefing area.  After the bean counters in the corporate news offices figured out how much they were saving on hotel and food for their reporters, the a/c tab probably seemed like a bargain.

For Bush vacations were about renewal of the spirit and he found his balance while cutting down mesquite trees and putting up fences.  Manual labor, hard, hot work for a man who was carrying the weight of a country under attack on his shoulders.

President Obama vacation this year has taken him back to a place that he is familiar with as well. He spent much of his youth in Hawaii and only last year returned their following the death of his grandmother.  This year, the time off doesn’t carry the same cloak of grief, but a time of family fun and recreational relaxing all at a price that would make some Americans a little uncomfortable. Although there are accomodations available for less than the rate of $750,000 daily rate for beachfront house that will house the Obama clan, there is still the issue of feeding the rest of the entourage.  The most parsimonious diner will find it hard to find anything on the menus of Honolulu for less than $22.  But the weather is beautiful allowing time for golf which will add $100 to the expense account.

It is certainly easy to see why the press would prefer Obama over Bush.  Of course it is always easy to choose Paradise over Inferno, especially if someone else is picking up the tab.  And with this president, all spending is considered an answer to the recession.

President Bush began his tenure eight years ago after an acrimonious campaign and an even more acrimonious fight over election results in Florida.  Things would go downhill from there.

Following the Clinton administration many Republicans and Conservatives hoped with be a error of smaller government and the return to the Reaganesque times.  Those dreams were short lived.  From sabotage in the White House to an almost immediate international incident in the skies above China, Bush floundered through the first eight months and then September 11th broke the damn of chaos.

The mistakes that Bush made and the choices he was forced to accept will be the fodder for historians to come, but has Bush been the most inept President in history, as the polls say, or just the subject of bad press and even worse luck?

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

Source

Bush has made himself an easy target in many ways.  The son of a one-term president, reformed drinker, and born-again Christian — any one of those would have been enough to give Jay Leno monologue material for decades.  But despite his shortcomings, Bush is one of those people who others envy because he is not only comfortable in his own skin, but he stands by the principles he lives. And many Americans find that to be his greatest shortfall.

History has sometimes looked back on presidents more fondly than their contemporaries.  Hopefully, that will be the case of Bush.  For in a country full of flawed individuals, who among us can say what successes we would have had with the hand that he was dealt.

We Choose To Go To The Moon

This speech, which was delivered by John F. Kennedy at Rice University in Houston, TX on September 12, 1962, might have been directed to the space race, but it speaks to many more things that were a concern for the Kennedy administration of the early 1960’s as well as the decisions that must be made by whoever occupies the White House during any decade.

The tenure of JFK, like the of Bush administration, was punctuated by choices with which others have found in:   the Bay of Pigs, sending advisers into Vietnam, a coup in Iraq that would eventually bring into power Saddam Hussein.

History, perhaps shaded by Kennedy’s tragic death a year after this speech, has found much laudable about him and overlooked both his personal and political frailties.  As George Bush enters the the end of his tenure, it is interesting to consider how history will view him.  Will time prove that his decision, although unpopular during his presidency, were made not because they were easy, but because they were hard.

Senator and Mrs. Obama, welcome to the world of real politics.

The current cover The New Yorker depicts the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife as “a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create.”

While Obama himself has refused to comment, many supporters have decried the magazine as being incendiary.

Mr. Obama, in the words of the great Dr. Phil, quit whining!  You have ascended to the highest ambition that any one could ever imagine.  With that, comes a certain amount of scrutiny–some good and some bad.  If you can’t handle the cover of New Yorker magazine, you sure can’t handle the press that will come to you as the president.

Look at a previous issue of the same magazine.  This is one of several depiction of President Bush from the New Yorker archives.  Does Mr. Obama seriously believe that he is immune from the same treatment?  Just as Hillary Clinton learned during her campaign, politics is an equal opportunity abuser. A candidate can not expect to be treated seriously if he or she dodges behind a shelter built of those things some would consider “distasteful.”

Congratulations to the New Yorker for integrating the truth of parody into the political landscape again.

Update:  Jon Stewart of the Daily Show satirizes the New Yorker satire of Obama.

President George W. Bush met with Pope Benedict XVI in the private areas of the Vatican today. The intimacy of the meeting and the closeness of the relationship that has developed between the Pontiff and the President, have lead many to speculate that Bush may be close to following Tony Blair’s footsteps and converting to Catholicism.

Several Italian newspapers cited Vatican sources suggesting that Mr Bush may be prepared to convert. One source told Il Foglio, an authoritative newspaper, that “Anything is possible, especially for a born-again Christian such as Bush.”

He added that while the Holy See deplored the war in Iraq, “on ethical matters he has always had a line that is practically identical to that of the Vatican.” Mr Bush has spoken out against gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research. He proposed amending the US constitution to “fully protect marriage” as the “union of man and woman as husband and wife”.

Read entire story here.

Jeb Bush, the president’s younger brother and former governor of Florida, converted to Catholicism in the mid 1990’s, joining into the faith of his wife, Columba, who was a devout Catholic before their marriage. The patriarch of the Bush clan, George H. W. Bush and Mrs. Bush are members of the Episcopalian Church. Bush 43, raised in his parents’ church, became a Methodism after meeting his wife Laura, and they were married in the First United Methodist Church in Midland, Texas on November 5, 1977.

A source close to the Vatican said that Mr Bush was the most “Catholic-minded” president since John F Kennedy, who famously played down his Catholicism. Mr Bush belongs to a Methodist church in Texas and prays at an Episcopal church in Washington.

However, George William Rutler, a New York-based priest who is close to the president, was quoted by the Washington Post earlier this year saying that Mr Bush “is not unaware of how evangelism, by comparison with Catholicism, may seem more limited both theologically and historically”.

Nonetheless, the Bush White House has had a strong Catholic influence including speech-writers and consultants and is also thought to have asked a Catholic priest to bless the West Wing.

The Pope’s visit to the White House in April was an especially cordial one with the White House adorned with yellow flowers to replicate the Papal flag of yellow on white. A personally selected gift was given to Holy See during a special White House celebration of his birth. At Bush’s visit to the Vatican, he was given a similarly cordial welcome.

The two men spoke for half an hour in the 12th century Tower of St John, a private area in the Vatican gardens which is used by the pope for private reflection.

The usual protocol for heads-of-state is a meeting in the pope’s library in the Apostolic Palace, but a spokesman for the Vatican said Benedict wanted to reward Mr Bush for the “warmth” of his reception at the White House earlier this year.

Whether Bush is contemplating a change of church, nothing is expected to be made of the rumors anytime soon. Like former UK Prime Minister Blair, it is assumed that Bush would delay any such actions until after he leaves office in January of 2009.

The phrase “If only” is used by those who employ hindsight rather than foresight to mitigate the damage of blunder or inaction.

When President Bush used the quote of William Edgar Borah (R-Idaho), “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided,” Democrats and presidential candidate Barack Obama roared back in rage.

“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack,” Obama said in the statement his aides distributed. “George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

Bush’s spokesmen countered that the statement was not intended as a reference toward Obama, who had said earlier that he would be willing to meet with the leaders of rogue nations such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea.

There is an old adage that says “The bit dog yaps first.” Obama’s idealism for change perhaps should be tempered with the reality mined from the wisdom and experience of the past.

If so, he might be less inclined to hold so optimistically his views of those who hold the US in contempt. Just as there was no reasoning with Hitler, there is no reasoning with terrorists who have publicly displayed their brutality and lack of respect for humanity.

“If only” doesn’t provide comfort to the families of those 3,000 innocents who perished on September 11, the wife of Daniel Perlman, or even the victims of Ted Bundy. Sociopaths do not feel compassion, but only the self-centered compulsion for personal and total gratification. They don’t respond to reason for they are devoid of the capacity for empathy rendering them incapable of valuing the lives of any other living beings.

As proven so well in World War II, the politics of appeasement is a road to disaster. It would serve the country well to avoid Senator Borah’s plan of action and adopt that of a far wiser Republican whose “Trust but verify” motto brought safety and civility to our nation.

From Tuesday’s White House press conference with Dana Perino, long-time Washington reporter Helen Thomas, now a columnist with Hearst Newspapers, had a few pointed questions about the mission at hand in Iraq. From the official transcript:

THOMAS: Yesterday, according to The New York Times, we dropped a bomb on a home in Sadr City and burned alive a pregnant woman and her children. How long is the siege of Sadr — how long are we going to keep bombing Iraqis?

PERINO: Well, I’m not aware of that particular report. I have not — I’ve not seen it.

THOMAS: Well, it was pretty buried in the story.

PERINO: Okay. Well, the operation against the militias in Sadr City will continue until they root them out. And that is expressly in order to protect people like you just mentioned.

THOMAS: Root who out, Iraqis, in their own country?

PERINO: It is Prime Minister Maliki’s government which is going after the militia, which is appropriate.

THOMAS: Why are we bombing these people?

PERINO: Any time anyone that is an innocent civilian is hurt in a conflict, we obviously regret it, and we go out of our way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

THOMAS: Thank you.

Poor Helen Thomas, she is like the crazy aunt that everyone dreads inviting to the Christmas party but no one has the heart not to. No longer officially a “White House Correspondent,” when the press briefing room was recently remodeled, a chair was designated as her special domain. Not in the back of the room, of course, but front and center where she can continue to throw her liberal barbs directly at whatever unlucky spokesman stands behind the podium.

Despite President Bush’s obvious attempts to humor her, she continues to needle the current administration, seeming to hang on specifically to see her beloved Democrats return to dominance at the White House.

God Bless You, Helen. You presence continues to exemplify the bulldog tenacity that has kept you a thorn in the side of Republicans for over 50 years.