John L. Overland, Jr., Esq.

Even as I write this I know that people smarter than I will have written their own concise and analytical commentaries as to what went wrong for Republicans during the mid-term elections of 2006 and for me, that’s OK. My intent is not to analyze what went wrong for us but to express my own appreciation to a man often belittled, often maligned, and often unjustly so. That man is my President, George W. Bush, and right now I sincerely believe that the President needs some kind words. He has received damned little in the course of his Presidency. Instead, throughout his Presidency and certainly in the last week he has suffered the most vicious attacks, consistently from the Left but lately even from certain of us on the Right, and it’s time to provide an honest appraisal.

I have a few problems with Gerge W. Bush myself, but I always reconsider when I reflect upon his ability to drive the lefties right around the bend. Nobody who affects leftists the way the crucifix affects vampires can be all bad.

The Anchoress is moved to justified indignation by the discreditable behavior of certain people at the Toronto Film Festival, celebrating and applauding a film made entirely for the purpose of dramatizing the assassination of President Bush.

(Ths kind of fantasy) makes me realize that this Bush hate on the left is not about Bush. It’s not about Iraq, it’s not about the war on terror, it’s not about tax cuts…it’s not about Bush. It’s about the foot-stomping tantrums of the perpetually adolescent who – even before the 2000 elections – could not bear even the idea of their side being out of power in congress and out of the White House. It has never been about Bush. They’d hate any Republican in that White House just as roundly and completely, on any pretext.

All this time, we thought it might be about something. Now, we realize, all this hate is about nothing but them, and what they want and their childish angst. It is about the delay to the coup they had in place and their frustrations at having to wait and in some cases, rebuild.

I’m beginning to think they deserve the world they want. But I surely don’t, and neither do my kids. Neither does the rest of the world.

Jonah Goldberg suggests that criticism of Bush could be sometimes (just a trifle) exaggerated.

LORD KNOWS I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those “trust” exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.

But you know what? It’s time to cut the guy some slack.

Of course, I will get hippo-choking amounts of e-mail from Bush-haters telling me that all I ever do is cut Bush slack. But these folks grade on the curve. By their standards, anything short of demanding that a live, half-starved badger be sewn into his belly flunks.

Besides, the Bush-bashers have lost credibility. The most delicious example came this week when it was finally revealed that Colin Powell’s oak-necked major-domo Richard Armitage — and not some star chamber neocon — “outed” Valerie Plame, the spousal prop of Washington’s biggest ham, Joe Wilson. Now it turns out that instead of “Bush blows CIA agent’s cover to silence a brave dissenter” — as Wilson practices saying into the mirror every morning — the story is, “One Bush enemy inadvertently taken out by another’s friendly fire.”

And then there’s Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don’t call them tickle-parties.

The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, see Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on piñata Bush’s “competence.” The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to their reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe it’s not all Bush’s fault.

Then, of course, there’s the war on terror. Democrats love to note that Bush hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden yet, as if this is the most vital metric for success. Yes, it’d be nice to catch Bin Laden — no doubt Ramsey Clark, the top legal gun for both LBJ and Saddam Hussein, will be looking for a new client soon. But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn’t been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11. Indeed, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a (typically) long, exhaustively reported cover story by James Fallows about how the U.S. is in fact winning the war on terror, thanks largely to Bush’s policies (though Fallows works hard not to credit Bush).

Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like free-standing complaints. That’s how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.

That’s why Bush’s Democratic critics flit about like bilious butterflies, exploiting each superficial or transient problem just long enough to score some points in the polls and then moving on. Bush’s Medicare plan was an egregious corporate giveaway, they cried, until seniors overwhelmingly reported that they like it. And the Patriot Act? Can anyone even remember what the Democrats were whining about? I think it had something to do with libraries that were never searched.

Look, things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too. John Kerry could be president.

Keith Olbermann put “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on his stereo, turned the volume up on high, and proceeded to explain to MSNBC’s viewers that Donald Rumsfeld was being McCarthyite by criticizing defeatism, and that Rumsfeld’s urging courage and endurance made him like Neville Chamberlain, while persons outside government, demanding appeasement, retreat, and surrender in the face of militant Islam were really all courageous Churchills.

Rick Moran already has performed the obligatory task of shredding Olberman’s nonsense in detail.

I will just observe mself that Olberman’s rant was delivered in a tendentious and partisan tone, and included insolent rhetoric, absurd allegations and expressions of wildly subjective opinion utterly and completely incompatible with the role of a supposedly objective commentator.

For example:

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelope this nation – he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have – inadvertently or intentionally – profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The spectacle of another empty-suit talking head climbing atop his electronic soapbox, and striking heroic poses, while insulting a variety of individuals in the current administration who left seven figure jobs heading up major business organizations to work in government as “profiting and benefiting, both personally and politically” from a syntactically confused melange of leftwing paranoid fantasies was particularly contemptible.

Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, responds to the left’s most dishonest blogger‘s rantings over criticisms of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s NSA opinion by the Washington Post (and others), observing:

the Administration is giving the program only a very partial defense in its public documents, so there is a lot more that we don’t know. (For example, I teach and write in the area of the Fourth Amendment, and my view is that I don’t know enough of the facts to know if the program violates the Fourth Amendment.

Professor Kerr has identified the most interesting feature of the NSA flap. The December 16, 2005 New York Times leaked NSA story accused the Bush administration of “monitoring,” a term subsequently rhetorically upgraded to “spying,” and ultimately to “eavesdropping,” on international phone calls and email messages “within the United States” without warrants.

The Bush Administration’s accusers knew that they were taking a very serious step by divulging the existence of one or more top secret National Security programs, and they not surprisingly chose merely to apply partisan and inflammatory characterizations without ever specifically describing what it was that they were pointing to with feigned outrage.

Since all this is secret, no one outside certain intelligence agencies and the upper reaches of the US Government really knows who is doing what, when, or to whom. It is really as if all it required was for Messrs. Risen and Lichtblau to write a story saying “the Bush Administration is secretly violating the law,” some unidentified persons said “by doing bad things,” and the left faithfully falls into zombified lockstep, and begins shouting cries of pain and outrage in chorus.

A key problem is no one has ever been identified anyone who has ever experienced a known wrong, or a perceived consequence of any kind, from whatever it is that NSA might, or might not, be doing.

Can the Constitution really be violated, or the law be broken, by persons unknown secretly peforming unknown acts devoid of discernible effect?

The left obviously thinks that George W. Bush is just intrinsically unconstitutional, and that he breaks the law just by being in office, and their grasp of so much of the MSM allows them to create an echo-chamber alternative reality in which the liberal articles of faith -which everybody knows- seem very real, however tenuous their relationship to mere diurnal reality.

The Australian reports: Addressing an audience of schoolchildren in Brisbane, Australia, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, suffused with indignation at the violence in the Middle East, confessed, “Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.”

We all knew that Woodstock, New York and Berkeley, California have a demented moonbat problem, but Rolla, Missouri?

A local editorialist there named Dave Weinbaum is afraid that Bush is going to run again.

Yes, I know the 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Weinbaum has figured out a loophole.

Bush has finally done it.

He now acknowledges that Karl Rove stole two presidential elections in collusion with Diebold Corporation and the Supreme Court. He’s so repentant that he has decided to run once more for the presidency…legitimately.

You see, if he was never legally elected, term limits don’t apply to him.

Since he claims no knowledge of the actual crimes committed by Karl, learning of them after the fact, there’s no likelihood that he’ll be indicted, much less impeached. Republicans, if they maintain their control, can stop all Lib attempts at such feeble gestures…

The only way Dems can stop this from happening is to win the majority in Congress…or bribe enough Republicans to vote against the President.

And I thought the strongest US pot was grown up in Humboldt County….

It’s not like he’s all that conservative, really. (He spends money like a democrat, and he added another major entitlement program.)

And it’s not like he’s done such a great job managing the war. (He’s invaded only two lousy Islamic countries and he has not even interned the antiwar radicals.)

But he does have one great quality: He is absolutely fabulous at upsetting and irritating the left. When the typical moonbat starts talking about George W. Bush, he turns positively purple with rage, and emits a fine spray of spit as the pace of his hysterical rant accelerates.

Mark Morford demonstrates the correct technique in today’s SF Chronicle:

It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.

Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.

George W. Bush is just like that.

Everyone I know has had enough. Everyone I know is just about done. There is this threshold of happy deadened disgust, this point where the body simply resigns itself to the pain, a point where the disease, the poison has seeped so deeply into the bones that you just have to laugh and shrug it all off and go for a drink. Or 10.

You do have to love Bush.

Bill Sammon, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, notes that the president is getting considerably less than fair reporting from the MSM.

When President Bush nominated Gen. Michael Hayden to run the CIA, the press focused on disapproving Democrats and even some Republicans who were dubious about confirmation.

A month later, when the Senate confirmed Hayden by a 78-15 vote, the story was given much less emphasis in the media, which had moved on to other stories critical of the Bush administration.

Similarly, when Bush nominated one of his aides, Brett Kavanaugh, to the federal judiciary, the press was filled with reports about Democrats threatening a filibuster because Kavanaugh once worked for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in the case against President Clinton.

Last week, there was much less media coverage of a Rose Garden ceremony in which Bush presided over the swearing-in of Kavanaugh, who had been confirmed by a 57-36 vote.

Bush has quietly been racking up small victories like these that seem at odds with the media’s conventional wisdom of a presidency on the skids.

In addition to success with his nominations, Bush also is presiding over a booming economy and is even scoring some foreign policy advances..

“In today’s political climate, daily headlines and fast-moving events make it easy to lose the forest for the trees,” Bush counselor Dan Bartlett wrote in a memo this week. “But there is a clear tide of positive developments that reflect the president’s ability to get things done.”

“President Bush’s leadership is achieving a steady flow of results that do not always dominate the day’s headlines on their own but that together represent real progress for the American people,” Bartlett said.

Instapunk explains how the MSM did it.

while the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good.

It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t have to be fair, it doesn’t have to be consistent in its terms. All that matters is that it is repeated with uniform constancy: drip, drip, drip. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Change the headlines, seem to change the subject. Abu Ghraib. European disdain. Tom Delay. Katrina. Deficits. Valerie Plame. Gas prices. Karl Rove. Death in Iraq. Angry mothers. NSA wiretaps. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the lede is always the same. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Forget the good news, bury the accomplishments or ignore them altogether. Drip, drip, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good.

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush’s approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It’s taken them just 18 months [corr. per Tim] to bring him down another 20 to 25 points.

He’s perfectly right. Bush survived well enough until the Hurricane Katrina gave the MSM what it needed, a spectacular disaster story, in which exaggerations and distortions could be disseminated day after day after day with no possibility of factual correction. Bush might have prevented their success with a better public relations campaign, but he doesn’t do very much of that sort of thing or do it all that well.

Collected comments on Stephen Colbert’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

Richard Cohen:

Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person’s sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Colbert made jokes about Bush’s approval rating, which hovers in the middle 30s. He made jokes about Bush’s intelligence, mockingly comparing it to his own. “We’re not some brainiacs on nerd patrol,” he said. Boy, that’s funny.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush’s Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” when he would have put it differently: “This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.” A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country. His defenders — and they are all over the blogosphere — will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences — maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or — if you’re at work — take away your office.

But in this country, anyone can insult the president of the United States. Colbert just did it, and he will not suffer any consequence at all. He knew that going in. He also knew that Bush would have to sit there and pretend to laugh at Colbert’s lame and insulting jokes. Bush himself plays off his reputation as a dunce and his penchant for mangling English. Self-mockery can be funny. Mockery that is insulting is not. The sort of stuff that would get you punched in a bar can be said on a dais with impunity. This is why Colbert was more than rude. He was a bully.

Glenn Reynolds:

I call him brave when he mocks Mohammed on the air. Until then, he’s not even a bully. He’s just a comedian, only one who’s not being very funny.

Nathan Gardels:

For those of us in the smart political set who are right about Bush being wrong in Iraq and elsewhere, it was hard to swallow. At the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner Saturday night in Washington the President embarrassingly outironicized Stephen Colbert. If, as Kierkegaard long ago understood, the capacity for ironic self-reflection is a sign of deep intelligence, what did it mean?

I surprised myself by saying to Mort Zuckerman that “a man who is that funny can’t be all bad.” And his timing was better than Jerry Seinfeld’s…

Bush may not be able to beat the Iraqi insurgents or Osama bin Laden, but he surely put Steve Colbert’s performance afterward to shame. Has he disarmed Comedy Central by being funnier than they are? I certainly thought so.

————————————————-
UPDATE

Joshua Trevino sums it all up.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds.

Jack Kelly observes:

You’ve got to hand it to President Bush

For a pretty decent, straightforward guy, he sure has a knack for making enemies. His job approval rating is in the mid-30s, Nixon-during-Watergate levels. This is remarkable, considering that:

(1) The economy is in better shape than in all but a few months of the Clinton presidency, still fondly described by the news media as a time of milk and honey.

(2) There has been no successful terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11, contrary to the prediction of most terrorism “experts,” including yours truly.

(3) Iraq’s insurgency has pretty much been defeated. Al Qaida operatives there are being ratted out or hunted down by their erstwhile allies, and are looking to relocate.

(4) The president has appointed to the Supreme Court to justices who more than 60 percent of the American people believe to be superbly qualified.

Despite all this (at least apparent) success, President Bush is less popular than was Jimmy Carter, who presided over stagflation and gas lines at home and humiliation abroad.

Much of this is due to the utterly mendacious coverage by the news media of the war in Iraq. Most Americans think we’re losing a war we’re clearly winning.

I think Mr. Kelly is basically right, but overlooks the September miracle last year of the MSM’s turning public opinion fatally against this administration on the basis of a series of false reports revolving around Hurricane Katrina.

We in the Blogosphere took the success of blog reporting in exploding the fabricated CBS National Guard story as signalling a new era, in which MSM propaganda could readily be dissipated by the conservative blogosphere. Hurricane Katrina and Iraq War coverage both prove that incessant MSM broadcasting of a barrage of negative stories is still quite effective at molding public perception and opinion in a fashion immune to factual correction.

A day-after-day avalanche of mendacious Goliaths has been proven to be able to shout down Mr. Reynold’s “Army of Davids.”