Redstate

An what exactly have you done with George Bush 2000?

By haystack Posted in Policy — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

As the President of the United States, your job has two fundamental requirements:

Lead

Execute

Your leadership meant something once.

Your agenda and ability to get it accomplished once offered items sufficiently noble or well-intentioned that enough of us out here in America could either rally around you, or accept them as worthy alternatives to opposition lunacy.

These lines of demarcation have dramatically blurred.

No one ever accused you of being a Conservative from among those of us who consider ourselves to be as much, but we considered you Conservative "enough" to hire you instead of both Al Gore, and later, John Kerry.

Even the greatest skeptics among us were, at the very least, willing to rally behind you because of your strength, commitment, and righteous indignation about that for which you fought so long and hard to accomplish.

Where did that man go, Mr. President?

More below the fold...

Margaret Thatcher once said, while discussing the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, that:

Of the four, it is prudence that the ancient philosophers traditionally placed at the moral apex.

They did so because they understood, quite rightly, that without that practical, seemingly rather dull, virtue none of the others could be correctly applied. You have to know when and how to be brave, or self-controlled or fair-minded, in particular situations. Prudence -- or what I would prefer to call a good, hearty helping of commonsense -- shows the way

You have shown us prudence Mr. President. At times your application of this virtue has inspired us while at others it has angered us. In every instance, however, you were leading us.

For much of your early administration years, eternally intertwined with the loss of America's innocence, your courage and temperance and justice gave us strength, and renewed our hope. In retrospect I would offer that your prudence, like a father's sin returned to visit upon his son, would begin your undoing.

We begged you reconsider caving in to Senator Daschle on farm entitlements. We pleaded with you (and warned of the dagger heading toward your back) not to capitulate to Senator Kennedy on Education. But we stood by you.

When you decided to "bail out" the Airline Industry and allocate dramatic bereavement reimbursements to September 11 victims' families, we were stoic. But we stood by you.

When faced with a vacancy on the Supreme Court, we pleaded for a stout jurist, with a long Constitutional record and the fortitude to defend her against all judicial activism from the Left and against the prevailing wisdom of the Media intent on agendas and pet interests well aligned with Liberal popularism. You offered a candidate with everything BUT what was on this list. But we stood by you.

When challenged at our ports by foreign investment proposed at the security-sensitive underbelly of American borders, we begged you to stand up for American sovereignty and against those attempts to take "political correctness" beyond rational policy and National Security, and you flatly ignored us; with impunity did your administration reject our insistence that such a sensitive and vulnerable element of America's safety should not be left in the hands of those who would see our allies destroyed and removed from their historical homeland. But we stood by you.

So the list continues. So, too, did we stand by you then, and do so still. Yet as the list grows, and as we continue to find ourselves accepting policy we don't consider in our collective best interest, so does your Administration further distance itself from those of us who work so hard to find new reasons to stay by your side in the fight.

You supported an immigration policy many of us find unacceptable. You support it still, and offer it up again under the protection of a new Congress you naively believe has ANY interest in working WITH you. This new proposal is nothing more than a new shade of lipstick, and it will go on the same pig.

You fought poorly for a fairly well thought-out Social Security reform initiative, lost with embarrassment, and offer a now-poorly thought-out plan with much the same rationale for your healthcare initiative. Why you believe you can get the Left to support market-based programs here where no favor could be found for it in the realm of Social Security frankly escapes me.

You made us choke down perhaps the largest entitlement program in American history with the Prescription Drug program, and all through our rejections of its basic tenets and justifications, you ignored us. We asked you to consider the deficit and debt ramifications, especially in a time of war, and you ignored us...yet we are STILL asked to stand by you.

You have asked so much of us, and yet we have gotten little in return. We may have never expected to get ALL of what we wished for, but an occasional morsel to keep pavlov's dogs coming back for more would have been extremely helpful.

While we thank you for having pretended to care in asking for our opinions, some of us find further requests somewhat disingenuous, as we are fairly well "tapped out" at the energy well.

The biggest problem your Presidential legacy poses for us left behind to carry on in our failing pursuits of Conservatism finding its rightful place in American society is the impact your work will have on those who would seek to replace you.

Your legacy leaves even the most devout Republican loyalists looking for cover, and finding re-election shelter under the roof of departure from your policies and a newfound affinity for Democrat friends.

Your open embrace of criticism and the devout manner in which you continue to presume you are outwitting and outmaneuvering your opponents leads you, me, and any who I might otherwise support to replace you, further out into the wilderness.

Your abandonment of Conservative first principles, be they extended appropriations(read hand outs) to those otherwise able to do more for themselves than you want to ask them to, your willingness to cede our borders to illegals in some unenforceable temporary worker program, your acceptance of the Democrats' expectation that our Iraq policy shift from that of victory (we stay 'til we're done) to the new..."this is not open-ended", and your complete departure from the notion of smaller government leaves me empty and hollow, and looking for a presidential candidate for 2008 that, if he ever existed, is now running for cover.

All I have to show for 6 years of steadfast support and faith in your governance is a complete and utter lack of any replacement that is even willing to CONSIDER campaigning to replace you.