Here’s Bill Kristol on Joe Biden’s queer historical revisionism:

Vice President Biden — who was for the Iraq war before he was against it, and who then argued that the surge could never work before he decided (in retrospect) that it did — said this to Larry King on Wednesday night:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Iraq is “one of the great achievements of this administration”? Well, any port in a political storm — even if it means taking credit for the success of policies of the previous administration, policies you opposed. In politics, after all, success acquires many fathers. And that’s fine, if it means the Obama administration is careful over the next couple of years not to toss away American troops’ achievements in Iraq.

Here’s George Will:

In February 2008, President George W. Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus — this was Stimulus I — would be the “booster shot” the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.

In January, the Obama administration, shiny as a new dime and bursting with brains, said that unless another stimulus — Stimulus II wound up involving $787 billion — was passed immediately, unemployment, which then was 7.6 percent, would reach 9 percent by 2010. But halfway through 2009, the rate is 9.5. For the first time since the now 16-nation “euro zone” was established in 1999, the unemployment rate in America is as high as it is in that region, which Americans once considered a cautionary lesson on the wages of sin, understood as excessive taxation and regulation.

I want you to keep that unemployment-rate-despite-government-action in mind.

As I continue to read The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shales, I’m blown away by two repeated points: (1) Everything I was taught about Hoover, FDR and The Great Depression in school was wrong — Hoover was FDR Lite, not his opposite. And, (2), in many ways the Bush to Obama transition is parallel to the Hoover to FDR transition.

For example, FDR expanded many government construction projects that Hoover started, such as the Hoover Dam, which FDR’s cronies renamed as “the Boulder dam,” in order to take attention away from that fact.

Shales continues:

There were further commonalities. Hoover had spent on public hospitals and bridges; Roosevelt created a post of relief administrator for the Republican progressive Harry Hopkins. Hoover had loved public works; Roosevelt created a public works administration… Hoover had was a problem created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation [RFC]; Roosevelt put Jones’s at the head of the RFC so that he might address the debt…. Hoover had wanted to pass legislation to help farmers. So did Roosevelt. “What it was all over,” [New Deal agriculture adviser Rex] Tugwell would later write,” I once made a list of you deal with ventures begun during Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and then as president… the New Deal owed much to what he had begun.”

Yet other projects were mere gentle departures from Hoover. Hoover had encouraged families to tend the substance gardens so that they might feed themselves with their own vegetables. Roosevelt instructed [Interior Sec. Harold] Ickes to develop a substance homestead project where families might feed themselves on new farms. Hoover had signed a Glass-Steagall banking act in 1932, to expand credit; Roosevelt now prepared his own Glass-Steagall act.

Hoover had deplored the shorting of Wall Street’s rogues; Roosevelt set his brain trusters to writing a law that would create a regulator for Wall Street. The new securities and exchange commission [SEC] would turn the stock market from a free for all the hazy rules into a more comprehensible game, one of which a small player had a more fairer shot. Hoover had expanded public works to create jobs; Roosevelt too would create jobs and relief programs. Hoover had not cared much about prohibition, and neither did Roosevelt; he now sought to end it.

Much to the chagrin of true economic conservatives, Bush began a stimulus, Obama greatly expanded it; Bush started TARP, Obama expanded it; Bush expanded the scope of government in both size and domain, he advanced expensive legislation such as the new Medicare prescription bill. Despite his power to do so, he never vetoed government spending or bills that hurt private enterprise, from CAFE initiatives to carbon-trading concepts. Bush is Hoover. Obama is FDR. And 7 years from now we might all still be stuck with near (or worse) double-digit unemployment.

Perhaps Chas Freeman should subscribe to MEMRI.org?

A textbook for 8th grade students explains why Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs.Quoting Surat Al-Maida, Verse 60, the lesson explains that Jews and Christians have sinned by accepting polytheism and therefore incurred Allah’s wrath.To punish them, Allah has turned them into apes and pigs.[25]

A schoolbook for 5th grade instructs the students: “The religions which people follow on this earth are many, but the only true religion is the religion of Islam.As for the other religions, they are false as mentioned in the Koran (the Sura of Aal ‘Umran Verse 85): ‘And whoever follows a religion that is not Islam, it will not be accepted from him and in the Hereafter he will be of the losers.”The religion of Islam we know from the Koran and the Hadiths about the Prophet. The whole world should convert to Islam and leave its false religions lest their fate will be hell. As mentioned in the Koran (the Sura of Al-Nihal Verse 125): ‘[I swear] by Him who holds Muhammad’s soul in his hand that not one Jew or Christian who had heard me and did not believe in the message that I was sent with shall die without being one of those whose fate is hell.’”

The students are then asked to mark “yes” or “no” to the following questions:

*”The Islamic religion is the road to heaven…”

*”Other religions bestow eternal damnation on their adherent…”[26]

“There is a Jew Behind Me, Come and Kill Him!”

A schoolbook for the 9th grade on Hadith introduces a famous narration known by the name, “The Promise of the Stone and the Tree.”It tells a story about Abu Hurayra, one of the Prophet’s companions who quoted the Prophet as saying: “The hour [the Day of Judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.A Jew will [then] hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will call upon the Muslim: ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah! there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’ – except for the gharqad tree, for it is one of the trees of the Jews.”[27] The Hadith is accompanied by a number of statements:

1. “It is Allah’s wisdom that the struggle between Muslims and Jews shall continue until the Day of Judgment.”

2. “The Hadithbrings forth the glad tidings about the ultimate victory, with Allah’s help, of Muslims over Jews.”

3. “The Jews and the Christians are the enemies of the believers.They will not be favorably disposed toward Muslims and it is necessary to be cautious [in dealing with them] .”

The book asks questions for class discussion:

1. “Who will be victorious in the Day of Judgment?”

2. “With what types of weapons should Muslims arm themselves against the Jews?”

3. “Name four factors leading to the victory of Muslims over their enemies.”[28]

In a textbook for 5th grade on the “History of the Islamic State” the students are told that the Prophet Muhammad had concluded an agreement with the Jewish tribes in Medina so that they would not commit treacheries against Muslims. “The Jews (then) broke their promise because they were known for treachery, and the Prophet had expelled them from Medina to their relatives in Khaibar where they started plotting (again).”It is then that the Prophet had decided to invade them, destroy their fortifications and bring them under submission.[29]

A subject of discussion in the classroom is the case of Abdullah bin Saba, a “hypocrite Jew” who converted to Islam fraudulently and caused sedition among Muslims which resulted in the martyrdom of the third Khalifa, Othman ibn ‘Affan.[30]

Leahy Proposes Panel To Investigate Bush Era
U.S. Attorney Firings Among Issues
By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 10, 2009; A04

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday called for a “truth commission” to investigate controversial actions of the Bush administration, including the politically inspired firings of U.S. attorneys, the treatment and torture of terrorism suspects and the authorization of warrantless wiretapping.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said his proposal is meant to launch a fact-finding inquiry into key decisions of George W. Bush’s presidency, including intelligence matters before and during the Iraq war and scandals at the Department of Justice. He said such a commission would not seek to prosecute former administration officials but would have the power to subpoena them to testify.

“Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened,” Leahy said as he outlined his proposal during a speech at Georgetown University. “Sometimes the best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.”

Leahy likened the proposed commission to the “truth and reconciliation” panels that investigated the apartheid regime in South Africa and the 1979 Ku Klux Klan massacre in Greensboro, N.C. He said the commission could be made up of “a group of people universally recognized as fair minded and without axes to grind.”

George W. Bush = Apartheid.

Dick Cheney = KKK.

Yeah, no axes to grind there…

While we’re on the topic, perhaps Sen. Leahy can investigate himself and fellow House and Senate Democrats, because many of them as members of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees were informed of and, one assumes by their years of silence on the matter, agreed to the government’s decision to both warrantless wiretapping (what is oft erroneously termed domestic wiretapping) and harsh interrogation methods. Also, the senator should investigate himself for years of leaking classified intelligence to the media (he was even stripped of intelligence duties in the 1980s before his rebirth as head witch-hunter).

Next, Leahy’s committee could investigate Leon Panetta, President Obama’s pick for the director of CIA. Panetta, it seems, agreed to outlaw torture except when the government decides it “absolutely necessary to find out what information that individual has,” which is a nice way of saying that his CIA actually won’t outlaw torture. (The WSJ rightly termed this the “Jack Bauer exception.”)

Perhaps Leahy could investigate former President Bill Clinton, who instituted rendition as a U.S. policy? And while he’s investigating Clinton for rendition, he could also investigate Clinton for firing every U.S. attorney (whereas Bush only fired some).

Finally, Sen. Leahy needs to investigate Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama himself, because according to The Washington Post, Obama and Holder “invoked the same ‘state secrets’ privilege as its predecessor [Bush] in federal court in San Francisco yesterday in opposing the reinstatement of a lawsuit that alleges that a Boeing Co. unit flew people to countries where they were tortured as part of the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition.’”

This puts Obama’s CIA in the same place as Bush’s CIA. It would seem that it’s far easier to criticize intelligence gathering as a candidate than it is as a president, whom the public holds accountable for their safety. This, in part, explains why Obama wants little to do with Leahy’s ridiculous fishing expedition.

Wow. I cannot recall an inauguration treated with such disrespect. Obama can’t choose his supporters, I guess, but it’s going to be hard for him to unify as he promised when he’s backed by persons who clearly have no interest in unifying. They just want their pound of flesh.

American elections are founded on the notion of peaceful and respectful transitions of power from leader to another. Yet here were the typically rabid Bush-haters in the crowd chanting the “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” song (by Steam, how’s that for trivia). All that was missing was the “Left, Right, Left…” chants given to a fouled out player during a college basketball game. Stay classy Democrats.

But as sad as that spectacle was the benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowery was a mixture of insult and embarrassment.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

I get it, okay. It’s an historic occasion that a black man has been elected president. Nonetheless I take offense at the notion that the country is just a few steps past the racially troubled 60s. Fact be known, the only people who ever made race an issue in this election were the media, who preemptively predicted that it might be a problem for Obama. That never came to pass. So, saying that whites might “embrace what is right…” That’s supposed to be unifying and post-racial?

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson:

A disinterested appraisal of Bush administration foreign policy will take years. For millions on the Left, events in Iraq, Guantánamo, and New Orleans rendered the 43rd president an ill-omened phantasma—omnipotent, ubiquitous, and responsible for all mischief big and small. “Bush Did It” soon became a sort of ritual throat-clearing that critics evoked at each new Florida hurricane, Israeli-Palestinian mini-war, or serial “revelation” from a Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, or Scott McClellan.

The fact remains, though, that most of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives shared Bush’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein after 9/11. They patted the president on the back when he finally did so (after 16 months of acrimonious debate between the fall of the Taliban and the invasion of Iraq), abandoned him when the postbellum insurgency arose, opposed the surge when he nearly alone supported it, and gave him no credit for Iraq’s eventual success. Now, in a sort of theater-of-the-absurd fashion, they claim Iraq worked largely because they once declared it lost and thereby prompted the necessary changes. The congressional opposition’s record on Iraq is largely one of opportunism, his of principle—and that too will become part of the historical record.

Yet, strangest of all, well before even assuming office, the ever-flexible President-elect Obama has done much to prompt reassessment of Bush’s tenure. He apparently has chosen to drop most of his primary-election rhetoric and instead intends to continue nearly all of the sitting president’s anti-terrorism and foreign-policy initiatives—albeit cloaked in far-more-winning mantras of hope and change, energized by youthful charisma, and predicated on subtle appeals to multiracial fides.

The only discontinuity seems to be with the stance of the mainstream media. Without apology, journalists have already gone from the narrative of Bush, the destroyer of civil liberties, to Obama the continuer of “problematic” and “complex” measures. So just as Bush once eagerly licked his chops and salivated over Gulag Guantánamo, so Obama now with wrinkled brow and bitten lip is himself tortured that he has to sorta, kinda keep it open for a while longer.

Abroad, Bush has had three major successes.

Read the rest.

Mark Steyn again, from the same article below:

As we “neo-imperialists” quickly learned, there are simply no takers for imperialism in America. This isn’t merely a leftish revulsion. Many on the right also quickly detached themselves from the Bush Doctrine. George Will pointed out that there was no Madison or Hamilton in Iraq. True. But you could say the same for Canada. If the caliber of Madison is a necessary condition for liberty, then almost everywhere on the planet would still be in chains. Had the British waited for an Indian Madison or Hamilton to show up, then the subcontinent would look much like the Middle East does now — a toxic patchwork of decadent sultanates and psychotic dictatorships. But they didn’t wait: They got to work. Sometimes the tough assignments fall on your watch. That was the challenge Bush accepted after 9/11.

To his British hosts at Whitehall Palace in London in 2003, he put it this way: “We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. . . . Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold. . . . No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.”

There is both realpolitik and idealpolitik in there. The West’s unreal “realism” in the Middle East brought us the House of Saud, the Baathists, Arafat, the ayatollahs . . . and ultimately al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Wahhabi subversion around the planet. There’s nothing more pitiful than naïve cynicism: To the old CIA line that he may be a sonofabitch but he’s our sonofabitch, the best response is that he may be our sonofabitch but in the end he’s a sonofabitch, as we should have learned by now in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and elsewhere.

Words matter.

To repudiate half a century of American policy in the Middle East is easier said than done. Whether or not the Bush Doctrine would work in Araby, by the second term it was clear it wasn’t working in Washington. Transferred to State, Condi Rice defaulted to Scowcroftian unrealism, and the president himself, while he talked about staying on offense, gave the impression that his eponymous doctrine had been put at the back of the icebox and that the war (as fewer Americans were inclined to see it) had dwindled down into a couple of messy, defensive, thankless, semi-colonial policing operations. The “war on terror” concept will die with his administration: Neither Barack Obama nor the European leaders he finds congenial think it a useful model. But in Iraq, where Saddam’s goons shoveled children into mass graves, and in Afghanistan, where women were prevented by law from feeling sunlight on their faces, 50 million Muslims live better lives because of George W. Bush.

Here’s some selected excerpts from Mark Steyn’s commentary in National Review on Bush’s exit from office:

Conservatives can’t complain they were misled, although many do. Governor Bush campaigned in 2000 as the GOP’s first open, out-of-the-closet federalizer of the school system and as a big softie pushover for the ever-swelling ranks of the Undocumented-American community. “I’m proud to be a compassionate conservative,” he declared the very first time I saw him on the stump, back in 1999 in New Hampshire. “And on this ground I will make my stand!” It struck me as pretty mushy ground, and by midway through the speech he appeared to be in it up to his elbows. Most of us were suspicious of the “compassionate” schtick, resenting the not-so-implicit rebuke to non-adjectival conservatism. But we were demoralized by the impeachment flop, and watching a touchy-feely sob-sister campaigning in Spanish for increased education spending it seemed reasonable to conclude that the guy couldn’t possibly mean it. He was surely indulging in the GOP equivalent of those feints that doctrinaire Democrats feel obliged to make every other November when they suddenly discover they’re “personally” opposed to abortion or start scheduling improbable hunting expeditions.

Two months into the new regime, no less an authority than Anthony Lewis of the New York Times assured us that “George W. Bush and his people are driven by right-wing ideology to an extent not remotely touched by even the Reagan Administration.” In those heady days of spring 2001, it was easy to take Señor Compasión at the Left’s estimation of him. Do you remember some of the “controversies” around back then? Arsenic in the water supply? I didn’t even know I was in favor of that until Bush started doing it.

But it turned out the compassionate conservative did mean it — on immigration, education, and much else. And, whatever we feel about those policies, we cannot say that we were betrayed — for few candidates have ever been so admirably upfront. Indeed, it is a peculiar injustice that the 43rd presidency’s most obvious contender for a Bartlett’s entry should be “Bush lied, people died.” The activists who most assiduously promoted the line are now having to adjust to the news that their own beloved “anti-war” candidate’s commitment to bring home every last soldier within 16 months has been “revised” into a plan for some 30,000–70,000 troops to remain in Iraq after 2011. On Fox News the other night, I found myself talking to a nice lady from Code Pink who was trying to grapple with the fact that Henry Kissinger and Karl Rove are more enthusiastic about Obama’s national-security team than she is. Many other Obama policies now turn out to be inoperative, and we haven’t even had the coronation. I don’t know about my Code Pink friend, but I already miss Bush’s straightforwardness. He spoke a language all but extinct in the upper echelons of electoral politics. “Bush lied”? Here he is in Crawford, early in 2002, being interviewed by Trevor McDonald of Britain’s ITN:

“I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go,” said Bush.

“And, of course, if the logic of the War on Terror means anything,” Sir Trevor responded, relentlessly forensic in his determination not to let Bush get away with these shifty evasions, “then Saddam must go?”

“That’s what I just said,” said the president. “The policy of my government is that he goes.”

“So you’re going to go after him?” pressed Sir Trevor, reluctant to take yes for an answer.

“As I told you,” said the president, “the policy of my government is that Saddam Hussein not be in power.”

Etc. George W. Bush is who he is, and he never pretended to be anything but. Do you know how rare that is? If you don’t, you surely will after six months of Barack Obama’s enigmatic cool.

Courtesy of the New York Times, the sheer scale of their “Bush caused the mortgage crisis” lie is staggering. That the New York Times engages in purposeful amnesia over the 1970s to the 1990s, the Clinton Administration, the Community Reinvestment Act, or that Democrats in Congress blocked every attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leaves me speechless. To paraphrase the Nazis, if you’re going to lie, lie big… I guess.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

“There are plenty of culprits,” but we’ll blame Bush. The loan policies were intended to help minorities, but since we had planned a series of stories calling him a racist had he not tried to expand the program we’ll just blame the crisis on him instead. Congress refused to oversee Fannie and Freddie, but we’ll blame Bush.

Un-Bel-ievable. The notion that everybody should own a home didn’t start with Bush, it started with Jimmy Carter, was radically expanded under Clinton, and bipartisanly in Congress throughout the 1990s.

To propagate that “how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making” is a stinking lie, wrapped in manure, stuck inside a land fill.

But like I said below, when you betray your own base it encourages your enemies to grandiose proportions.

WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush says he’s offering $17.4 billion in loans to the auto industry because letting them collapse is “not a responsible course of action.”

Actually, rewarding inept CEOs with taxpayer money is what’s “not a responsible course of action.” Chapter 11 bankruptcy would be the responsible cure for their ills, even strenghtening the industry, but as George Mason’s Prof. Todd Zywicki explained last week, “Those Washington politicians who repeat the mantra that ‘bankruptcy is not an option’ probably do so because they want to use free taxpayer money to bribe Detroit into manufacturing the green cars favored by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, rather than those cars American consumers want to buy. A Chapter 11 filing would remove these politicians’ leverage, thus explaining their desperation to avoid a bankruptcy.”

Chapter 11 has the added benefit of curbing compensation for management (those CEOs who ran Detroit into the ground) and forcing the United Auto Workers union to end the ridiculous clause where laid off workers receive up to 95% of their salary for several years. Chapter 11 allows the business to continue operations as long as it is restructuring — restructuring is exactly what the CEOs and UAW wants to avoid. They instead gladly suck on the teet of taxpayer money.

But folks, Bush’s failure to stand for free market principles is exactly how one goes from an expected partisan 45-50% approval rating to just 29% by the end of his term. It wasn’t Iraq, it wasn’t Guantanamo, etc., as the mainstream media and antiwar conglomerate would preach, rather it was Bush’s failure to champion those things near and dear to conservatives.

How can conservatives back a president whose end results appear no different than a President Obama’s?