Niagara Falls, Moe, Curly, and the Bushes

In a famous routine of the Three Stooges, Moe is more or less normal until someone says “Niagara Falls”, at which point he goes nuts and stalks and attacks whoever said it, driven mad by the horrid associations the phrase has for him. I think it is likely that for a long time we may be able to get the same reaction out of serious Republicans by saying “Bush Administration”.

It is hard to overestimate the trauma that Bush father and son have inflicted on the Republican Party and some of the good causes it intermittently tries to advance – not to mention the damage they’ve done to the country. Consider Dad first. In 1988 George H. Bush carried forty states and won election easily, more because he was Ronald Reagan’s vice president and his opponent was inept than because of any real fondness for him among voters. Having been elected on Reagan’s coattails, the first thing he did was to insult his benefactor and repudiate anyone who favored freedom and limited government by announcing that the bad old days of skepticism about government power were over and that he was going to give us a “kinder, gentler” government that properly appreciated all the fine work done by the members of the bureaucratic class.

After that bang-up start, things got worse. He bungled America’s response to the historical opportunities and challenges of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He failed both to help the Russians move toward a more liberal society when they were most needful and to push them to disarm when they were most vulnerable. In public he played down the extent and significance of the victory (perhaps , as has been said, because he really liked the alleged stability of the Cold War stalemate and was sorry to see it end) and offered a generally sorry contrast to the behavior of President Truman after the defeat of the Axis. At home he betrayed both his word and his supporters by raising taxes and later managed to convince the public that he was wandering through a recession in an unconcerned daze. He gave us major and burdensome new mandates and controls and had an odd record in appointing judges. (Whatever one’s opinion of David Souter and Clarence Thomas, almost nobody would think they were both a good idea.) He did oversee a successful war in Iraq, but there is at least some evidence that clearer and firmer diplomacy before the fact might have made the war unnecessary and that Mrs. Thatcher provided most of the backbone for the eventual decision to rescue Kuwait. Irrespective of that, he left Iraq a festering mess with Hussein still in power and able to murder rebels and dissidents by the thousands for several more year.

Then there is the way he mishandled the bully pulpit. He seemed not only to lack serious political principles and ideas but to be disdainful of the notion of serious political principles and ideas. One got the impression that he saw himself as an aristocratic pragmatist and administrator who thought “the vision thing” was pretty much déclassé or even mainly for suckers and rubes. That may be one reason he was so inarticulate. (It is hard to express your ideas well when you don’t have ideas to express.) In any case he had no ability to inspire his fellow citizens and in 1992 became a political disaster – inarticulate, condescending, unconcerned and ultimately unable even to fend off Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. No rich man’s idiot son ever ran through an inheritance more profligately than he squandered his party’s hard won political capital.

So by 1992 Dad had lost the White House and effectively told visionaries, libertarians, limited government liberals, and principled conservatives that he hoped the Republican Party would have no meaningful truck with them. Then, after eight colorful but generally successful and prosperous years of Bill Clinton , came Junior.

George W. Bush got the Republican nomination over a weak field and won a very narrow victory over an ignorant and unlikeable opponent who had been tarred by the scandals of the Clinton Administration. He responded well to the attacks of September 11, 2001, ordered swift punitive action in Afghanistan, and at the end of 2001 seemed to be leading a united country effectively. However, shortly thereafter his administration began a long slide into failure and ineptitude that would leave him being likened to Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. The key event was the war in Iraq. Almost everyone now says that the war was a costly mistake. This is not only because no chemical or biological weapons were found but because of the effects the conflict has had on Iraq, on our armed forces, on our position of leadership in the world, and on our nation. It is as though at almost each step George Bush copied the mistakes of Vietnam and made choices leaving us with worse alternatives than before. His maladroit attempts to justify his actions, his total misreading of the culture, desires, and capabilities of the Iraqis, his placing our success in the hands of the Iraqi government, and his strategic blunders have been nothing less than disgraceful. He has led this nation to expend hundreds of billions of dollars and to suffer thousands of casualties in a war that is simply not worth the cost and was not necessary in the first place. The best rationale that supporters of the war can find now is to claim that even if we should not have gone there, we are there, and it will be bad if we leave as losers. That is true enough, but it begs for a solution that ends our participation in the conflict without our looking like losers, and it in no way excuses the decisions that got us stuck to this tar baby.

Besides the war in Iraq, George W. Bush has given the nation massive increases in federal spending, moved the federal budget from surpluses to large annual deficits, overseen a big decline in the value of the dollar, failed to forestall the subprime mortgage mess, botched the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, mishandled OPEC and policy on energy, and made a mess on immigration. He has been politically inept and may be a worse and less convincing speaker than even his father. He made no productive use of the longest period of Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House since before 1932, and has put his party in such disrepute that Republicans are now having to scramble to re-brand themselves.

The administration has had impressive success in one important area - the war on terror. There have been no significant attacks on the United States since September 2001. However, even there we also find significant failures and shortcomings. President Bush has violated the rights of citizens, given us the TSA and its idiotic procedures, and taken a totally un-American position in favor of torture. And he has managed to split the nation and wreck its consensus on the need to oppose the Islamic terrorists.

So, we should all be careful and try not to provoke any Republicans into saying “slowly I turned …“ .

Conservatives and moral relativism

Conservatives in all sorts of venues frequently and vehemently accuse leftists of moral relativism and denounce them for it.

A while back I noticed a minor example of what they find offensive on one of the cable news networks. The newsperson, in covering the anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma City, was able to refer Timothy McVeigh as a domestic terrorist, but in covering Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas , could only manage squishily to call Hamas a group of alleged terrorists. Conservatives make a very good point that, if one is unsure about whether those savages are terrorists, it would be hard for the term to retain any meaning or usefulness in describing anyone or anything. This sort of thing and much worse are commonplace, whether in setting up a spurious moral equivalence between radically dissimilar people and events, making a “multicultural” or “diversity” excuse for the vile or inferior, or creating fake indeterminacy to avoid obvious conclusions. Nevertheless, the conservatives are wrong .

There are real moral relativists, but I think that dedicated leftists are not usually among them. A typical serious leftist is more likely to be a true believing doctrinal absolutist. He may espouse relativism about some of the things you care about, but he will be as dogmatic as a 16th Century Dominican about the things he cares about. An apparent moral relativism can function more as a tactic than as an actual belief. It allows him to undermine his opponent’s position in situations when frontal attacks seem at present unlikely to succeed. When conservatives see leftists as morally lax relativists, they underestimate their opponents and the strength of their convictions.