Bush and the conservatives

Recently John Hawkins at rightwingnews.com wrote a review of the Bush presidency. Early on we read: "George Bush has not been all bad as a President." That faint praise is in contrast with the Left, which sees Bush as evil incarnate and can think of absolutely nothing that it likes about him. Hawkins says that Bush is a decent guy who was better than the alternative in 2004, and that we should cut him some slack on foreign policy because the world is a tough place with many challenges that anyone in the office would face.

Then he starts picking at what he does not like. In Iraq "his horrific miscalculation on the costs in blood and treasure of that whole war has been disastrous." "On the domestic front, all in all, Bush has been a nightmare." Hawkins can see no domestic policy that looks like a major positive achievement, and Bush "refused to make a serious effort to cut down on Congress' out-of-control spending." He approves the tax cuts but dismisses them as a major positive achievement because they are not permanent.

It seems that nothing could be worse than his foreign and domestic policy, but "the place where Bush really fell down was on the political side of things." "Bush inflicted calamitous amounts of completely unnecessary damage to the Republican Party with his decisions...." Hawkins says that Bush let his critics define him, and he has not effectively fought back, something any decent politician should be able to do.

With friends like this, and I suspect that this view is pretty widespread among conservatives, Bush does not need enemies. But he has even more of those.