Cheney

One of the more entertaining news stories from the last week is the squabble between RINOs Colin Powell and Dick Cheney.  Cheney observed on a talk show that he didn’t realize Powell was still a Republican.  Powell retorted that he was a Republican because he had voted for Republicans Reagan and Bush II as well as Democrats Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Obama.  Powell’s response makes as much sense as Cheney’s reputation for being a conservative, which nonsensically appears to be based on his advocacy for business interests and war in Iraq.

In itself, watching two big-government RINOs argue over which can claim the mantle of “Republican” is as meaningful as professional wrestling, but what is at stake today is what, if anything, it means to be a Republican.  In 1994, the Republican Party was on the brink of a ushering in a political realignment that would have made it the majority party for the first time since 1932.  Republican leaders won power by talking a big game of small government, but they didn’t mean a word of it.  As they gained power in Washington, the beltway Republicans proved that what they believed in was big, intrusive, lawless government.  The result is the last election in which big-government Republicans got the whipping they earned by years of misrule. 

Powell and Cheney should be irrelevant, so it matters that people listen to their “debate” over which is a Republican, precisely because neither of them should be a Republican.  Powell and Cheney illustrate two visions of a Republican Party without principle. 

Powell’s vision is one in which the Republican Party should seek electoral victories by appealing to the same people who vote for Democrats, so that the difference between the two parties is one of brand name only.  His view appears to be that competing parties foster debate and that debate is good as long as it is not based on any ideological difference.  This is the voice of one who came up through the federal bureaucracy and distrusts political principle absolutely. 

Cheney’s vision is one in which the sole governing principle is reason of state:  that the interest and well-being of the state itself is the value government exists to serve.  What matters to someone like Cheney is that the “right” people hold the reigns of power, and provided the right people are in charge, there should be no legal or moral restraints on government’s power.  This is the voice of the second Bush administration. 

Fortunately, we don’t have to accept either Powell’s or Cheney’s vision.  In fact, we can tell both of them that, however they may regard themselves, we do not consider them Republicans.  “I may be out of their version of the Republican Party,” Powell said of his critics, “but there's another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again.”  Indeed, and therein lies our hope.  We have the benefit of two hundred years of political history in which successive leaders articulated and defended the principles of individual liberty, limited government, and constitutional government.  The likes of Cheney and Powell will be forgotten in a generation, and it is up to us to recapture our Party and provide the principled leadership our country needs now as much as ever. 

Scott Boykin is Chairman of the Alabama Republican Liberty Caucus.

Cheney Lost to Bush By DAVID BROOKS

I always enjoy reading articles where I gain new insight.

While I only agree with David Brooks 50% of the time, I always read his columns. Assuming that he has his facts right, he makes the case that there was a very serious & strong disagreement between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Then he goes into how close Obama and GWB are pretty much on the same page.

President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history.

Brooks posits that what most people think of as the Bush-Cheney era lasted only about 3 years. By 2005, the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun, and they were trying to close Gitmo.

Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil.

Then it gets more interesting, leaving the conventional wisdom (or lack thereof) behind. It’s really Bush who halted waterboarding, in opposition to what Cheney wanted.

Cheney and Obama might pretend otherwise, but it wasn’t the Obama administration that halted the practice of waterboarding. It was a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004.

Cheney, who sincerely believes he was right then, (and is right now), is now attacking the Bush administration, as well as the Obama administration - that is now adopting the same policies as Bush.

But then Brooks points out that Obama is correcting what GWB failed at - explaining his anti-terror policy in a way that people would understand.

The inauguration of Barack Obama has simply not marked a dramatic shift in the substance of American anti-terror policy. It has marked a shift in the public credibility of that policy.

Brooks defends Obama saying he has embraced almost all the strategies of the Bush years. He shows how in most cases, the Obama policy represents a continuation of or a gradual evolution from the final Bush policy.

He then quotes Jack Goldsmith, of The New Republic, describing what has been my biggest disappointment with GWB since 2003.

What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging.   The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”

I believe that if George Bush had explained day after day, week after week, month after month (albeit through the MSM filter that was determined to defeat him), things would have turned out much differently.

The very first day that Ted Kennedy accused GWB of “lying us into a war” and “misleading us,” and all the other Democrat lies that continued there after, Bush should have defended his actions and gone on offense. Or, at least on defence. But neither happened. And once the MSM picked up the narrative it was the beginning of the end of support for GWB’s terror policy which increased exponentially.

But now:

Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world.

Brooks, who has been quite enamored with Obama for some time, still makes a good case that I can agree with, on this subject. It’s the last sentence that I don’t buy, but that’s because of other factors.

Do I wish he had been more gracious with and honest about the Bush administration officials whose policies he is benefiting from? Yes. But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.

Cross posted at: http://www.tomllewis.com/

One of the biggest issues with this Russian/Georgian conflict is the fact that there is a lack of verifiable information. One minute you hear that the conflict has ended and the fighting has stopped the very next, you hear that the fighting is still happening, and that the Russians are not honoring the cease-fire agreement. It is all rather confusing, and it makes for a very frustrated blogger. Because the last thing a blogger wants to be, is wrong.

However, more than that is the lack of the Main Stream Media’s ability to look at this entire conflict in a historical context. Many are pointing to the actions of Ronald Reagan for dissolving the Soviet Union Empire, as being the cause of this conflict. I happen to disagree with that notion. I believe personally that it was the foolish actions of President Harry Truman, that is the cause of this conflict or shall I say the harvest of seeds planted by Harry Truman’s actions.

On December 7, 1941, the empire of Japan attacked the United States naval base in Oahu, Hawaii. This act of brazen hostility brought the United States of America into World War II, despite President Franklin Roosevelt’s pledge to remain neutral in the ever-growing conflict. As history would show, The United States fought the war and finally Hitler was defeated, and Japan surrendered. However, the method used to end the war, is in my opinion the underlying cause of this conflict.

It is a known fact that the United States soundly defeated Hitler by fighting them on the ground and air, using conventional weapons. However, we stopped the war, and to end the conflict with Japan, we used atomic weapons. This I feel was a tragic mistake. This is because Truman was a different kind of a Democrat than Roosevelt. Roosevelt was an “old line” Democrat, who saw the Communist threat, knew what the Communist doctrine was truly about, the repression of freedom and he stood to defeat it. No matter how long it took.

However, Truman was another matter entirely. President Truman represented the “new line” of Democrats who felt that war was unneeded and that peace was a better path. This was a precursor to the “peacenik” Democrats of the sixties. This was evident when President Truman gave his infamous “Military Industrial Complex” speech, at the end of his term. * - See below, please.  With Hitler out of the way, Truman, feeling the ever-increasing pressure to end the war and return the country to pre-war status, devised a plan to end the conflict with Japan.

While using the Atomic bomb might have been an effective means of ending a war, its impact and stain upon the United States would be long ranging, to this very day, is to be considered a very poor decision by the United States. On many websites in Japan, including those in English, denounce America as being brutal for dropping the bomb. However, those who had friends and relatives that died at Pearl Harbor felt that Japan got what it deserved.

It is in the opinion of this writer, that the United States should have fought the war, all the way to Russia, until communism was soundly defeated. Furthermore, The United States of America, should have never dropped the atomic bomb on the empire of Japan, but rather, should have fought that war on the ground, until Japan surrendered. This would have resulted in the total defeat of communism. However, as we all know, this never happened.

Because of this obtuse neglect, the United States of America began a “Cold War” with the empire of the Soviet Union that lasted until a Conservative President, a real conservative President, whom came on the scene in the eighties to plant the seeds that would eventually bring down the soviet empire. However, as we have seen here in the last few days, Russia is not a free and democratic society; it is simply a police state, without the outright communism.

Putin, a man who is sympathetic toward the old soviet empire, filled to the brim with communist doctrine, is wagging his finger in the face of the United States and making a mockery of the supposed democracy in the European continent. This is the harvest of the neglect of the Democratic Party of the forties.

* Update: Oops! I blew it, Truman did NOT give the military-industrial complex speech, Dwight Eisenhower did. My bad. I blew it, I should have checked. But my point about the Democrats and the cold war as it relates to Russia still stands.

When Republicans began their campaign for the presidency in early 2007, I remember thinking that George W. Bush had thrown the party under the bus by choosing a running mate he knew would not run to succeed him in 2008, robbing us of a strong candidate and giving us the first election since 1928 where neither party had an incumbent president nor vice president seeking his or her party's nomination.

In retrospect, however, I realize that George W. Bush did the Republican party a favor by not saddling us with a candidate inextricably linked to a president with a 28% approval rating.  Even with Bush's low approval, there would have been enormous pressure to nominate an incumbent VP, and the party base, still largely loyal to GWB and the most reliable voters in the primaries, would likely have nominated a candidate much more vulnerable to the charge of being "Bush's Third Term."

Given all the talk about how Bush has weakened Republicans going into the 2008 election, I thought it worth pointing out that if we manage to win the presidency for another four years, it will be thanks in part to a decision made by none other than Bush himself.  The irony never ends.