President Bush Rallies the Nation. Why Did He Wait?

There are many who must wonder. Why did President Bush wait until now to rally the American people to the war in Iraq?

In his speech to the nation on December 18, 2005, President Bush, as he has done before, laid out his policy. And as he has done before, he acknowledged that there are valid grounds for disagreements with his policy. He admitted that the war in Iraq

has caused sorrow for our whole nation -- and it has led some to ask if we are creating more problems than we’re solving.

That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terror. If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.

This was an honorable thing to do, to lay out the core of the anti-war case. Bush then continued, and laid down the facts that led him to the decision to take war to the terrorists. Finally,

My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them.

The advantage of this sort of talk was that it frankly admitted the difference in opinion, without demonizing the opposing point of view. Then he went on to point out that, right or wrong, we had to finish the job. For to give up now would be to invite disaster.

But why did he wait until now to make this speech? I believe there are two reasons.

First of all, he has wanted to avoid the real Vietnam syndrome, the perpetual “light at the end of the
tunnel”—continually invoked and continually failing to appear as promised. If you have listened carefully over the last three years to President Bush you will know that he has been very careful about what he has said and what he has promised. So he has been prepared to put up with the hail of elite criticism until he has actually achieved the victory in battle that points to victory in the war. A national Iraqi election in which all Iraqis participate is surely as big a victory as you could wish for.

Secondly, there is Bush’s pride. I think that President Bush is too proud to rally Americans unless he has real achievement to rally us to. He just won’t give his opponents the rope to hang him with.

Bush in Bubble Racks Up Another "W"

There he sits, the incurious President Bush, isolated from Congress and living in a fantasy bubble. And on December 15 he stumbled into another touchdown in the War on Terror, as Iraqis in their millions went to the polls to elect a national parliament.

But he doesn’t have a plan! But there weren’t any WMDs! But he won’t admit his mistakes! But it’s all about oil!

I know. It just doesn’t make sense, does it. We must get the international community involved, as Senator Biden (D-Del) insists. We must get the UN involved. Otherwise we could end up with a disaster on our hands.

The big story, of course is that the Sunni voters turned out in force to vote.

In Saddam’s home province, Tikrit, more than 80 percent of voters turned out, a local official said.

And, according to reports, in Ramadi Sunni militias actually provided security at the polls.

That is what the Bush administration has been working to achieve all along, to make the opportunity for power through ballots more attractive than the opportunity through bullets.

Even as the Bush strategy slowly, step by step, gets results, you can see the point of the Democrat attacks. Their accusations apply a necessary tarnish to the achievements of the Bush administration. Instead of glorious triumphs, they seem like messy foulups.

So when it is all over, Democrats can say, yes, we won, but we won in spite of the efforts of the Bush administration.

And it could work.

Who Needs Literacy

About 14 percent of adults in the United States cannnot perform a simple reading task like “searching a short, simple text to find out what a patient is alloved to drink before a medical test.”

About 22 percent of adults cannot perform a simple computational task like “adding the amounts on a bank deposit slip.”

Adult literacy is slightly improved from the last adult literacy survey conducted in 1992.
That is what the U.S. Department of Education just released in its A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century.

Yes, but at least the rest of American adults are literate, right? Not exactly. Those with “basic” literacy, the ability to perform the simple tasks mentioned above, but nothing more, amount to 43 percent of the adult population.

Only 13 percent of American adults are rated “proficient” in prose reading, document reading, and computation skills.

So what’s the point? What’s the point of spending five percent of GDP on schooling K-12 when the net result is an America where only 13 percent of adults exhibit “proficient” skills in literacy?

Maybe these numbers are telling us something. Maybe they are telling us that literacy has been overrated. Maybe most people only need basic literacy skills. Maybe the fuss over literacy has been ginned up by literate people who think that everyone should be like them. After all, if literacy were the royal road to power, money, and the love of beautiful women, you’d think that everyone and his brother would be literate and proficient, and eager to cash in.

By the way, the survey only tested reading skills. Writing skills? Forget about it.

Hugh Hewitt Pops MSMer's Bubble

Be sure to check this interview of LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik by Hugh Hewitt. The full text is available on Radio Blogger. It is priceless.

Hewitt interviewed Hiltzik on his radio show because he had made some uncomplimentary remarks about Hewitt as director of the Nixon Library. The result was hilarious, as Hewitt revealed Hiltzik to be a committed left-wing activist, with consistently left-wing opinions on every left-right political issue from Helen Gahagan Douglas (for you youngsters, liberals consider Nixon to be a red-baiter because in the 1950 Senate campaign he called Douglas the Pink Lady, pink down to her underwear) to the Iraq War (he’s against it). Hiltzik found it difficult to agree that Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting in the 1950s was not in the same league as Stalin’s Great Terror.

After demonstrating, on issue after issue, that he is about as left-wing as you can get, Hiltzik won’t say who he voted for president in 2004. Oh no. That just wouldn’t be right.

The MSMers can never admit who they voted for. It would end the pretence of “objectivity.”

Your Bubble is Bigger Than My Bubble

President Bush lives in a bubble. That is the breathless conclusion of Newsweek reporters Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe. He doesn’t answer the calls of congressmen and his humor, rather than being inclusive and team building, like Ronald Reagan’s, is often intended to belittle a subordinate,

intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

Of course media analyst Brent Bozell is outraged. What Thomas and Wolffe are really upset about is that President Bush doesn’t call them. The media really doesn’t care about policy (except that it should be more “moderate”), it cares about access.

But Bruce Bartlett agrees with Newsweek. The president doesn’t like day-to-day politicking, meeting with members of Congress, or getting information from outside official channels. “The result is Mr. Bush appears to live in a sort of fantasy world utterly divorced from reality.”

The critics fail to appreciate that the leader of any organization must operate in a bubble in which most information is blocked out. Otherwise he wouldn’t get anything done. Every enterprise operates on faith in the future, and a willingness to ignore bad news and discouraging reverses. The key is to have the information to know when to take decisive action: to launch the right new product at the right time or to abort a failed initiative before it engulfs the enterprise in disaster. In the Iraq War, of course, the president would have gone mad if he had made it a point to be connected to the daily ups and downs of political sentiment.

On the two important national issues presented to him during his term in office, President Bush has made the right decision, bubble or no bubble.

President Bush’s war on terror operates within the simple grand strategic situation of the United States. It must not let the oil in the Middle East fall into the hands of one power. That is why the Iraq adventure makes complete strategic sense. It stopped Saddam’s predatory adventurism and it blocks Iran’s future predatory expansion westwards.

President Bush’s economic policy of tax rate cuts may well have prevented an economic meltdown. We cannot be sure of that, of course, because the tech crash did not develop into a full scale depression. Job One for an American president is to keep the economy on track.

People who do not understand these two points, the necessity to keep the Middle East divided and the necessity to keep the US economy on track, are the ones who are really living in a bubble.

But so far, President Bush has passed the test.

After the Iraq Election, Then What?

When you bring a nation back from the dark night of terror, you have to do it step by step. On December 15, the Iraqi people will elect the leaders who will lead the nation for the next several years. But, as Amir Taheri writes, the big problem comes later. It comes when the new government sets the economic framework for the new nation.

The trouble is that the Iraqi people cannot imagine anything other than a distributionist Soviet-style state.

It is important for the Iraqis to realize that they can’t build a Western-style democracy based on a Soviet-style economic model: A key condition of genuine democratization is the creation of a robust and self-confident private sector. Yet that is something that most members of the new Iraqi leadership reject, both by ideology and personal calculations. Almost all want to be chiefs and patrons distributing favors on behalf of the state and buying support for themselves.

Of course, this kind of attitude isn’t confined to Iraq. Many people in the United States, both politicians and ordinary voters, cannot see beyond the idea of the national government as a dispenser of benefits and favors.

The Iraqis have an advantage. They are not entering the world of democracy as pioneers struggling on an unexplored frontier. We humans know pretty well how a prosperous economy based on democratic capitalism works. It works best when you minimize privilege and subsidy, keep government interference and the size of the public sector down. It needs a robust court system defending private property against the power of the great special interests.

It is a truth that the peoples in the democratic countries have struggled with for over a century. Welcome to the club, Iraqis.

If Fathers Had "Choice"

If women deserve “choice,” then why shouldn’t men enjoy comparable rights to order termination or continuance of the fetus in the womb of their sex partner. That’s what Meghan Daum argues.

Most people now accept that women, especially teenagers, often make decisions regarding abortion based on educational and career goals and whether the father of the unborn child is someone they want to hang around with for the next few decades. The "choice" in this equation is not only a matter of whether to carry an individual fetus to term but a question of what kind of life the woman wishes to lead.

But if we are talking about the mother, er, host of the fetus making this sort of “lifestyle” decision, why not extend the same rights to the father, er, sperm donor?

So off goes Ms. Daum for 800 words of mostly unmarried hypotheticals. She illustrates with remarkable clarity how once you step out of the moral and legal framework of a marriage you end up in a moral and legal snakepit.

Let’s look at this differently. Let’s say that your “educational and career goals” are a fine thing, and the “kind of life” you wish to lead is an even finer thing. Can anyone say that their lifestyle choices are finer than a man and a woman entering into marriage and making a vow to bear and rear the fruit of their union?

When you “choose” to assume less than full responsibility for the children you conceive, aren’t you making a rather unfortunate statement about the kind of life you wish to live?

We’ve had about a century now of talk about overpopulation and the unwanted child and lifestyles and choice and all the rest of the opt-out agenda. Expect the next generation but one to develop a rather judgmental attitude towards all this self-serving talk.

As a Hindu friend said: If you get married and don’t have children, what’s the point?

People want to have their cake and eat it. They want the freedom to make choices, but don’t want to deal with the moral consequence of their choices.

People forget that freedom is not a cloud-cuckoo land where everyone is freed from every restraint and consequence. Freedom is the right to make the wrong choice, and live with that wrong choice for the rest of your life.

Let’s stipulate that abortion should be legal. But legal doesn’t make it right. And nobody should imagine that the choice to abort doesn’t have consequences, consequences that will be whispering in your ear for the rest of your life.

More and more, I am coming to believe that conservatives should say: Go ahead liberals and feminists, make my day. Go ahead and abort every liberal and feminist baby in sight. That’s what you liberals want; that’s what you believe in and that’s what you should have.

But we are conservatives. We believe in rules. We believe in following rules not because they are the law but because they are right. We just think that aborting babies is wrong. And we won’t do it.

You can see where this leads. It leads to conservatives grabbing the moral high ground. Liberals would hate that even more than they hate President Bush.