A night for blogging, no baseball tonight. Thankfully, there's a game tomorrow because of Albert Pujols. Boy did he crush that home run, it was a nice sight to see because the wild card is an abomination to the game of baseball. Hopefully the Cardinals take that series, it would be the first series between the teams with the best record in each league since 1999 (Atlanta vs. New York Yankees) and only the third since the present playoff format was adopted in 1995.
But the real subject tonight is history. With all the controversy about Harriet Miers and the "civil war" in the conservative movement, there were a few people who sounded the alarm way back before Bush took office in 2001.
First, I cite Michelle Malkin. This article is from September 10, 1999, "Will George W. work for a color-blind America?" To wit:
Although Bush claims to oppose racial quotas and preferences, he refuses to take a position on two landmark ballot measures that outlawed racial preferences by popular vote: California's Prop. 209 and Washington state's Initiative 200. More disturbing was Bush's failure to take a position on Prop. A, the 1997 Houston Civil Rights Initiative, which would have outlawed racial preferences in contracting by Houston city government.
If Bush cannot bring himself to support ballot initiatives that abolish government preferences, then his stated opposition to preferences is thin gruel.
Reading further:
If this is the voice of compassionate conservatism, Democrats have nothing to fear.
Bush's legislative record is depressing. This year he signed laws supporting minority contracting set-asides; directing electric utilities to develop diversity and set-aside plans; and creating race-targeted, scholarship-matching programs run by the state higher education coordinating board.
Some prominent conservatives – including Prop. 209 heroes Ward Connerly and Tom Wood of California – have endorsed Bush despite his reticence on racial preferences. Others, including Fred Barnes and Paul Gigot, focus on the anemic hope that Bush will appoint rigorous, conservative intellectuals to do the heavy lifting on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Emphasis mine.) California State University professor Glynn Custred, another Prop. 209 hero who casts a more skeptical eye toward Bush noted recently, "These tidbits, of course, tantalize conservatives, but they don't really tell us anything, and that's exactly the way George W. intends to keep it."
Unless, of course, grass-roots conservatives demand he unbutton his lips and use them to produce something more than poll-tested pablum.
Pretty stern stuff, written when the GOP field in 2000 was still somewhat open.
Then how about WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah, back on September 7, 2000. In an op-ed called "Consider yourself warned" he wrote:
I'm getting a lot of letters, these days, from people who say I'm being too tough on George W. Bush...What does George W. Bush stand for that is fundamentally different than Al Gore. To me the difference is like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumber. Wait until after the election? Oh, don't worry. There will be plenty of criticism left to go around after the election as well.
(L)et me give you one more concrete example of why, I believe, all those folks writing now pleading for mercy for Bush will be the same people writing to me complaining about him after Jan. 20 (2001).
One of the most frequently mentioned imperatives cited for supporting Bush over Gore is the selection of U.S. Supreme Court justices. I agree this is an important consideration for evaluating any presidential candidate...
(New York Times) Reporter Jim Yardley wrote: "Earlier this year, the Texas Supreme Court stunned social conservatives throughout the state by issuing a 6-to-3 ruling that allowed a 17-year-old high school senior to have an abortion without telling her parents.
"'It was shocking,' said Joe Kral, the legislative director for the Texas Right to Life Committee. It was, after all, appointees of Gov. George W. Bush who took the lead on the issue. ...
"(A) look at Mr. Bush's record in Texas shows that he has appointed justices who have had a moderating influence on the Texas Supreme Court, often regarded as among the most conservative and pro-business in the country. He has appointed four of the court's nine justices and has been a political patron for a fifth, Harriet O'Neill, who wrote the majority opinion in the parental notification case. ...
"Debbie D. Branson, president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, a group that has been critical of the court and Mr. Bush over the years ... agreed that the Bush appointees had started the process of moving the court back to the center (again, emphasis mine). ...
"By the Supreme Court's 1998-99 term, the liberal judicial watchdog group Court Watch found that Mr. Bush's appointees were 'eliminating the excesses of the G.O.P. old guard.'" ...
I suggest you give serious thought to Bush's judicial record in Texas. If you are voting for George W. Bush because you think he will bring America a better U.S. Supreme Court, I suggest you are being misled.
Again, very strong and prescient words. But not all is President Bush's fault. Here is another WorldNetDaily article by David Limbaugh that I printed and kept around for several years, and by gosh he turned out to be pretty much right. It's called "The 4 Years War" and it was written on December 5, 2000, in the midst of the Florida fiasco.
While most of it dealt with the Florida aftermath, these two pieces have remained with me and turned out to be right on the money. First:
The New York Times reports that "an array of liberal groups have begun organizing for what could be a succession of quick, brutal battles on nominations, tax cuts, the budget and other issues." These groups are said to be "energized and ready to fight." A far cry from the usual liberal cries for bipartisanship, no?
The media is already beating the drums for Bush to make concessions by appointing Democrats to cabinet posts and diluting his agenda -- as if Bush has done something wrong for which he must seek atonement.
And here's another home run, almost as well hit as Pujols':
Bush, as the lawfully elected president, will likely assume the presidency in a war not of his making. While he should still reach out to Democrats in an effort to work with them, he should be prepared to govern over their planned obstruction and must not retreat from his programs.
The problem is that he hasn't governed over their obstructions. And now with the Miers nomination, he's fractured a large percentage of the conservatives from his base of support. This is from a much more recent article I received in my e-mail by David A. Keene of the American Conservative Union.
What is most troubling about this whole (Miers nomination) affair, however, is the way the administration has gone about trying to demonize conservatives who have raised questions about Ms. Miers. It began from day one to attack personally the motives, loyalty and judgment of anyone who questioned the wisdom of the nomination. Since then, the ad hominem attacks on Miers’s conservative critics have been unconscionably heavy-handed and will haunt the president regardless of how the nomination fight turns out.
Most conservatives have stood with Bush from the beginning. Those of us who know him like him. We’ve swallowed policies we might otherwise have objected to because we’ve believed that he and those around him are themselves conservatives trying to do the right thing against sometimes terrible odds. We’ve been there for him because we’ve considered ourselves part of his team.
No more.
From now on, this administration will find it difficult to muster support on the right without explaining why it should be forthcoming. The days of the blank check have ended because no thinking conservative really wants to be part of a team that requires marching in lock step without question or thought, even if it is headed by the president of the United States.
I'm not sure we have to wait until 2007 or 2008 to see this happen. A good indication of how things will be comes next year when the campaigns crank up. Will stalwart conservatives want to be seen with and campaigned for by President Bush, or will he be avoided like the plague - a fate that occurred with President Clinton, as many of the candidates he appeared with on the campaign trail lost because of the association.
To me, things can be repaired if Bush gets back on the straight and narrow and fights for issues he promised to - Social Security, tax cuts, continuing to build of the successes of the War on Terror, and streamlining government. A good start would be endorsing the initiatives in Operation Offset and renewing the aggressive fight to save Social Security which he started last spring.
But I'm going to take a "wait-and-see" approach. I still support the President, but if one were to ask, I'd say he's been quite the disappointment in 2005.
