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In Praise of Bush
 Some
readers accuse me of having nothing
good to say about President Bush, but I can hardly help that. He swore an
oath to uphold the Constitution, and even his defenders don’t
seriously say he has done
so.  I
can easily imagine a movie called Mr. Bush Goes
to Washington and America Goes to Hell.
Bush’s judgment is also open to question. It isn’t just
Iraq, where, according to him, we are winning, there is no civil war to speak
of, and democracy has succeeded inspiringly, with the rest of the Middle East
to follow suit shortly. After gazing into Vladimir Putin’s eyes a few
years ago, he praised Putin’s good soul. Since then, everyone who has
crossed Putin has wound up on a meat hook.
But just to
show you I also see the positives, I think Laura Bush is one of our foxier first
ladies. She looks smashing in a red sweater. Not to be confused with Mamie
Eisenhower, if you follow me! Man!
And yet I
wonder what, as a librarian, she saw in George. Well, they say opposites
attract. But is their marriage in trouble? The tabloids keep insinuating that
he is playing around with Condi Rice, but I don’t buy it. For one thing,
look at her teeth. If she gave you a hickey, how would you explain it to your
wife? (“Oh, that? Er ... a space alien bit me.”)
I admit
I’m a crabby type. Whenever I watch Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, hoping to cheer myself up, I get annoyed by Jefferson
Smith’s proposal to create camps for kids. Where does the
Constitution authorize Congress to do that? Babysitting is neither a duty nor
a prerogative of the Federal Government, according to its own fundamental
law.
You can go
mad if you take politicians’ words seriously. Most people sensibly
ignore them. I can’t. I’m obsessed with the gap —
it’s an abyss, really — between word and deed. And it can be
funny to be aware of yourself as the only one who’s really listening.
People use
words so loosely and irrationally that they think you must be downright nasty
if you use them with care. When I say Lincoln was a disastrous president,
they think I’m making a personal attack. I’m sure he was a
charming and gifted man; but after all, he was willing to sacrifice more than
half a million young men to “save the Union.” By that, he meant
preventing the allegedly “free and independent states” from
being independent! It’s really that simple. I don’t care if he was
a saint; if he did that he was a disastrous president. Pardon me for being
objective.
![[Breaker quote for In Praise of Bush: Credit where credit is due]](2006breakers/061204.gif) Jews
are generally more intelligent than
gentiles, because they have the gift of concentration, but they can also be
just as silly when they don’t use the minds God gave them. In the
November issue of Commentary, for example, Gabriel
Schoenfeld says I have made the “charge of dual loyalty”
against American Jews who support the state of Israel.
Not so. And
why would it even be a “charge”? Most people have more than
one loyalty: multiple, divided, complicated loyalties, in fact. You can hardly
blame the Jews for being like everyone else in that respect.
Schoenfeld
has it backward. In fact, I wish some of Israel’s supporters (including
“Bible” Christians) would exhibit
“dual” loyalty, by occasionally putting America’s
interests ahead of Israel’s. Instead, they have favored two wars
against Iraq for Israel’s sake. Actually, I think both wars have been
bad for both the United States and Israel, not to mention Iraq. But now these
people want war with Iran too! The same issue of Commentary
urges both another war and another “regime change.”
That is like
saying that what we need right now is a good tragedy. A tragedy with a happy
ending, of course.
Those who
are eager for a war always tend to forget that it’s likely to be
executed by someone like Bush, after which they will complain that though it
was fully justified and could easily have been won, it was needlessly botched.
They are caught by surprise when the tragedy ends unhappily. Then comes
the old refrain, “Don’t blame us!”
I
won’t say America is the greatest country on Earth, but it’s
got to be one of the funniest. And I’ll give Bush part of the credit for
that.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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