Bush Country
Another glance back at the historical record of the modern conservative movement’s enthusiastic embrace of the most disastrous president of modern times. Today, let’s consider John Podhoretz’s book, Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane. Like all the best conservatives, Podhoretz has never really shown any ability whatsoever. Instead, he’s the son of an important conservative father and an important conservative mother, through which connections he got an unimportant job in the Bush I administration and thence proceeded through a series of positions at a variety of movement-controlled publications until eventually arriving at his current perch at Commentary. He didn’t impress anyone with his ability at any of his jobs, but he kept moving up in the world anyway, because, hey, that’s how it works.
A taste from Podhoretz’s first chapter:
One might conclude, from his conduct over the past three years, that George W. Bush was put on this earth to do two things:
First, to lead the United States into the third millennium, with all its terrifying challenges and wondrous opportunities.
And second, to drive liberals inane.
He’s succeeding brilliantly at both.
[...]
This would be an astonishing list of accomplishments for a president who had served all eight years in office. Bush has done it all in just three.
I’ve actually read this book in its entirety for professional purposes. It’s really an extraordinary testament to an extraordinary moment in American history.
20 Responses to “Bush Country”
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November 29th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Apparently not worth acknowledgment from your readership. Perhaps that’s for the best.
November 29th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I’ve actually read this book in its entirety for professional purposes
November 29th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Is that fiction or non-fiction?
November 29th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
And second, to drive liberals inane.
I had to take a gander at the “look inside this book” feature to find out whether this was Yglesias making a typo or Podhoretz making a play on words.
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Yglesias made yet another typo.
November 29th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I cannot stress how important it is to expose the outrageousness of these idiots, now, like Matt is doing, so that they can be properly shot down later in the heat of battle when they start attacking Obama and the Democrats. I hate for you to have to read all this crap, Matt, but you’re a good man for this job. Greenwald does it too but you’re way pithier.
November 30th, 2008 at 2:19 am
The literal translation of Podheretz is “thank you, sir, may I have another.”
November 30th, 2008 at 4:39 am
There are two reasons why you can’t attribute Bush’s failure to a failure of conservative ideology:
1) If conservatives are responsible for the failure of the Bush years, how come they aren’t also responsible for the good times of the 80s and the mid to late 90s, when Gingrich was arguably as influential a figure as Clinton?
2) yes, it’s true that many conservatives, perhaps even most, were extolling Bush’s virtues even while he was running the country off the cliff. I wasn’t one of them. I soured on him in 2002 and didn’t vote for him in the first place because I felt the term “compassionate conservative” was an oxymoron, a way to say “Big Government Conservative” without turning off conservative voters. The reason the right rallied around Bush was the same reason the left rallied around Clinton despite all of his heresies against liberal orthodoxy: he was under attack. Now that there is no more need to support Clinton, liberals feel comfortable criticizing his Presidency a little more openly, although they still love to claim that his policies created the prosperity of the 90s. And they are right: fiscal restraint, low taxes, welfare reform, free trade, and deregulation DID create the prosperity of the 90s, and Clinton supported all of it. Hopefully Obama will give us more of that.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
That book title is the perfect demonstration of why the Republicans are wholly unfit to be a ruling party. They don’t see government as having a bunch of pedestrian day-to-day responsibilities that it needs to carry out well; they see it as merely an arena in which to do ideological battle. Pissing off liberals is what politics and government are all about. Well, that and steering power and resources to your friends, so that THEY can also do things that will piss off liberals.
When people who believe that it isn’t important for the government to do its job well take over the government, the government tends not to do its job well.
Go figure.
Oh, well. Now the party that is fit to run a government is back in charge, and the party that is only fit to serve as the opposition is back where they belong, too.
November 30th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
1. The ideology can’t fail, you must have failed it.
2. Seriously, we think you’re chumps and don’t even remember point number one.
November 30th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
“When people who believe that it isn’t important for the government to do its job well take over the government, the government tends not to do its job well.”
True, but on the flip side, when people with too much faith in government’s goodness get in power, government can never fail, even when it does. If it does fail, it’s because not enough money has been thrown at the problem. In the worst case, when government fails, it’s because of the private sector, and Democratic politicians start talking about “crackdowns” on this or that immoral activity that they believe is hampering the functioning of society.
December 11th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Hey this is Brit again been away for a while just going to school and keeping busy.
.
Just wanted to let everyone know that the group is up and running. So if you are
a guy or girl and you are looking for a hookup then this is the place
Go here for the time of your life: http://www.wchurl.info/britney
April 9th, 2009 at 11:59 am
This topic is quite hot on the Internet at the moment. What do you pay attention to when choosing what to write about?
April 10th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
FANTASTIC!