perceptive commentary

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From:
Date: October 8, 2005 11:35:08 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: perceptive commentary


take a look at his  besat i have seen on bush problems

 not for attributing to me

http://www.thebusinessonline.com/SectionStories.aspx? 
SectionID=F200D393-0200-421B-894F-33C0717ACBD6&menu=1/3

Summery

IT should have been the crowning moment of his administration, the  
opportunity to exercise one of his most important privileges as  
President by picking two new judges to serve on the Supreme Court,  
thereby stamping his mark on American society for the next few  
decades, as only a few presidents have done before him.  Instead,  
President Bush’s astonishingly short-sighted decision last week to  
nominate a close colleague with no judicial track record for the  
Supreme Court, following an earlier uninspired choice, risks  
condemning his administration to being remembered as the most  
debilitating since the sorry rule of Jimmy Carter in the late  
1970s....  But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer  
President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear  
that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for  
Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his  
lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often  
wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to  
destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then  
reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal  
Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of.

...Last month’s death from thyroid cancer of Chief Justice William  
Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor was a unique  
opportunity for Mr Bush to tilt the Supreme Court to the right,  
completing the reversal of the liberal dominance instituted under  
President Roosevelt seven decades ago. There is not much in Mr Bush’s  
conservative social agenda that we admire but the two vacancies were  
an opportunity finally to bring down the curtain on the  
unconstitutional judicial activism which has dominated the Court  
since the Roosevelt years.  Sadly but characteristically, Mr Bush has  
blown it: instead of the conservative intellectual jurists that his  
supporters had the right to expect, Mr Bush has made the mediocre  
John Roberts, a moderate conservative with an undistinguished legal  
track record, the new Chief Justice and nominated Harriet Miers for  
the O’Connor vacancy.

...The modern Supreme Court has set the standard for America’s lesser  
courts to use the judicial system as a mechanism for social change,  
for which Americans did not necessarily vote, in areas ranging from  
school bussing and prayer to the death penalty and abortion (and most  
recently the powers of the President versus those of Congress in  
times of war).  An extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court in  
June illustrates its power and the controversial nature of its  
decisions: it ruled five to four that local governments could force  
property owners to sell their homes to private developers whenever  
officials decide it would “benefit the public”, even if the property  
is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed.

...They were already furious at the President’s incompetent selling  
of his social security reforms; they were equally angry at the  
collapse of his plans for major tax reforms through White House  
neglect; they have watched in despair as the President’s upbeat  
rhetoric in Iraq was confounded regularly by tragic events, including  
an appalling American death toll and a neo-con mission clearly  
adrift; those who fought the good fight to restrain government in the  
Reagan years stood by in disgust as Mr Bush increased domestic  
spending faster than at any time since President Johnson’s Great  
Society; and the nativist right is increasingly and dangerously surly  
at what it views as the President’s failure to tackle illegal  
immigration and secure the country’s borders.

...Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when  
senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy  
of public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat  
left to cut in federal spending and that “after 11 years of  
Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, it was clear  
that the inmates had indeed taken over the asylum.

...Far more Americans now describe themselves as conservatives than  
liberals; the Democrats now need to grab 60% of moderates if they  
want to win Congress or the White House, a pretty high hurdle,  
especially given the unimpressive state of the Democrat Party, which  
is increasingly in the grip of its left-wing activists and devoid of  
fresh or stimulating ideas.

The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America  
over the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in  
modern Western politics; it is unique to the United States, helping  
to explain the country’s exceptionalism and its growing cultural  
divergence with Europe.  The damning charge against Mr Bush is that,  
instead of using the continued dominance of the right to finish the  
large amounts of uncompleted business from the Reagan revolution –  
sorting out the social security system, simplifying the tax code,  
tackling America’s abysmal primary and secondary schools, reforming  
corporate welfare with the same gusto as welfare for the poor was  
reformed, forging a new consensus to wage the war or terror – Mr Bush  
has failed in all these areas, and in some has taken America backwards.

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