Democrats on Bush's "bumper-sticker" war

Democratic presidential candidates are pretty well all agreed that the war on terror is “Bush’s War,” a bumper-sticker business gussied up for purely political purposes.  

Unfortunately, the attempt to tie the war on terror around Bush’s neck tells us rather more about the Democrats than they might want, writes William Murchison.

We need to look carefully at the phrase "George Bush’s war." It tells us everything we need to know about this field of candidates. Not our war — not America’s. Mr. Bush’s war.

Because on the day before the latest Democratic presidential debate a crew of Islamists from the Caribbean were arrested for conspiring to blow up New York’s JFK airport.  The New York Times reported the arrests on page 30.

Republicans are taking the wrong approach to the Democrats.  The best way to persuade the American people that the Dems are no good is to vote them into office.  Already the new Democratic Congress is proving a disappointment to the voters.

Imagine what they would think if a Democrat were elected president, and, and...

Yes, just what would a Democratic president do about the jihadists and the adventure in Iraq?  Sooner or later we are going to need to find out.

Here’s a guess.  Our lefty friends in the netroots won’t like it.

Ted Kennedy Bridge Joke

You can’t do enough Ted Kennedy bridge jokes, any more than you can have enough of the time that Ted Kennedy visited a bond-trading floor in Manhattan.

“Any of you ladies need a ride home,” boomed a loud voice.

There’s a Ted Kennedy joke involving the late Pat, Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr., told by Linda Bridges. 

Ted Kennedy was staying in Gstaad and had visited the Buckleys along with the Galbraiths one afternoon.  The Galbraiths left early but Ted stayed on. 

Finally it was time for him to return to Gstaad, and rather than take the train he asked if he could borrow a car. “You certainly may not,” said Pat. “There are three bridges between here and Gstaad.”

Yep.  You can’t get enough of that sort of thing. 

How Do You Spell Freedom?

Back in the old days childhood was different.  Kids had more freedom, as Alice Thompson reports from Britain. She talked to her mother about life as a child during World War II.

Life as a child in those days was delightful.  The adults were far too busy to pay any attention to children. 

We broke into requisitioned houses and made camps; we spent our afternoons canoeing down the Cam without life-jackets, eating sausages out of tins and, when it rained, we slipped into the cinema to watch unsuitable love stories and horrifying images of the liberation of the concentration camps.

Of course, one time a man tried to force himself on her as she cycled to a friend’s house.  But she never thought of telling anyone until she got home. 

Thompson’s childhood was not much different.  She took the London subway home from school with her younger sister from the age of five.

Today things are much different.  According to a survey “Fewer than one in 10 eight-year-olds walk to school alone” in Britain today and there are signs in public playgrounds warning parents that is against the law to leave their children unsupervised.

And Alice Thompson is just as smothering a parent as everyone else:

I walk my three-, four- and six-year-old to school every day, clutching their hands.
Their every moment in London is supervised, with playdates and trips to museums.
I drive them to football and tennis. No wonder they love going to the country where they can spend all day making camps in the garden, pretending to be orphans.

In fact though, children have about the same risk of murder or kidnapping as a generation ago.

And though they have much less risk of being orphaned, they do have a pretty significant risk of being abandoned in divorce.

The difference is that government and media have learned that there is money and power and ratings in scaring mothers half to death. 

There ought to be a law.

What the MSM Won't Tell You

Abortion is a political issue so reports about medical research around the subject of abortion are politically charged also.

But sometimes the science really makes you sit up, as Melanie McDonagh discovered when she went to a lecture by pro-life researcher Dr. Byron Calhoun.

In his 2003 paper, “Induced Abortion and the Risk of Later Premature Births,” Dr. Calhoun reported that the risk of premature birth is doubled for a woman who has had two or more induced abortions, and nine times for a woman who has had four or more abortions. 

It made McDonagh sit up.

In other words, for a woman who has never had an abortion, the chances of having a baby before 34 weeks are about 3 per cent; in women who have had an abortion in the past, the rate doubles to 6-12 per cent.

Calhoun reviews the risks of abortion more generally in this paper Another Abortion Risk: Preterm Birth, including:

• Increased risk of maternal mortality
• Increased risk of breast cancer
• Significant emotional impact

And so it goes.

Daring to Use the F Word

It’s not that surprising that the Republican candidates haven’t trotted out the F word yet.  Two of the three leading candidates are divorced.  So if they start talking about “family” they’ll be accused of hypocrisy.

But then who isn’t a hypocrite.  It’s the homage that vice pays to virtue.

If the candidates aren’t willing to talk about family, Kay Hymowitz & W. Bradford Wilcox are.  And to make it easy they boil the political importance of family down to four issues.

1. Limited Government. “The foundation of limited government lies in strong, self-governing families.” 
2. Law and Order. It was 40 years ago that Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out that “crime is a marriage and fatherhood issue.”
3. The American Dream. Our national “prosperity depends on strong families.”  Simply put, married people earn more money than single people, and they save more.
4. The Vote. Married people vote more than single people, and married people vote Republican.

As we like to say these days: The science is in on this.  So how about it, candidates?

Dem Problem: How to Get Past the Crazies

At least President Bush has the guts to brush off his entire Republican base in rejecting our concerns about his immigration bill.

Democratic presidential candidates in debate have no such luxury, as Michael Graham reports.  

They've got to be against the war to satisfy the nutroots.  Yet they can't help looking over their shoulders at their eventual rendezvous with the general election voters in November 2008.

The more the first-tier candidates talked last night, the more it became apparent they were struggling to reach out to the crazies without becoming crazy themselves. Clinton, Obama and Edwards had no answer to the Kucinich challenge (If the war is really immoral, how can you continue to fund it?), so they blathered nonsense about who was really against the war first.

They also probably understand that when they ascend the rostrum in January 2009 they will still have a war on terror to fight.  So they blather on hoping for the best.

Senator Clinton, of course, has another important goal.  She needs to dispel her image as a shrill, divisive partisan.

Sen. Clinton was her usual, professional self: prepared, pleasant, generous. She knows her greatest challenge is her image, and she took every opportunity to appear friendly and collegial.

It’s a pity that when she’s on the stump she can’t think of anything better than tired sound bites about President Bush’s “on your own” society against her glorious vision of a “we’re all in it together” society.

Hillary Clinton "On Her Own"

We’ve already expectorated here on Sen. Clinton’s characterization of President Bush’s Ownership Society as an “on your own” society. It is deeply offensive to the American spirit to claim that the independence secured to Americans by their work and wealth is a selfish and individualistic thing.

Of course, Rich Lowry comments

she offers a collectivist vision of “shared responsibility for shared prosperity,” making the case for it based on a farrago of mistruths about the state of the economy

And the first mistruth is the idea that a high-tax high-spending state has anything to do with sharing anything.  Government is always about force and compulsion.  It is the democratic majority voting to tax the rest of the country to spend money on its projects.  Sharing and responsibility are things that people do out of trust and reciprocity, not out of compulsion.

Now she wants “to hit the restart button on the 21st century and redo it the right way,” she says.

Sorry, Senator.  I’d say that the achievement of President Bush in avoiding a major economic meltdown in 2001-2002 (remember: it was the biggest bear market of our lives) is something to be celebrated on both sides of the aisle.  It makes the idea of hitting the restart button not merely ignorant but dangerous.  You want to go back and go through all that again?  And risk getting the policy mix wrong?  And put the American people in harm’s way again?  Come on Senator, you know better than that.

The problem with speeches by Democratic politicians that utterly misrepresent the past, that completely miss the contribution of spending restraint and capital gains tax cuts to the prosperity of the 1990s, that utterly blanks out on the touch-and-go months of 2001-2002 in the aftermath of the collapse of the tech bubble, is that they fail to educate the very ignorant Democratic party faithful about economic reality.

You could say that Democratic leaders and the Democratic base like it that way.  But the American people are going to have to pay for this misrepresentation some time down the road.

Because when you don’t look at the past with an open mind it means that you are going to have to learn the lessons of the past the hard way.

And that, in an elite politician like Senator Clinton, is inexcusable.

Because it is never the suits that pay the price.  It is the ordinary people.