The Republicans’ Jimmy Carter

George W. Bush is on the verge of limping out of the White House as ignominiously as Jimmy Carter did – reviled, mocked, and bewildered. If his catastrophic 700 billion dollar giveaway gets through Congress, “W” – along with his liberal allies in Congress – will forever be remembered as the President who sold out America.

There’s no need to go over all the bad ideas rolled into this monumental transfer of public wealth to private coffers. Plenty of commentators have turned over the rocks to expose the dirty little creatures scurrying around beneath. I want to focus on Bush’s betrayal of his constituency and his country.

The Great Betrayer of Conservatism

For all his empty talk about the free market, Bush is revealing himself to be a statist who wants to manage the economy for the benefit of the wealthy. It is ironic that real conservatives are often falsely accused of promoting the American plutocracy, but it is Bush, the phony “compassionate conservative”, who is actually trying to deliver the goods. Unlike real conservatives, Bush likes the upside of free markets, but lacks the courage and conviction to accept the downside.

The premise of deregulation is that the market will be a better watchdog over financial institutions than government bureaucrats. The market has spoken. Fanny and Freddy, WaMu and Wachovia, AIG and Lehmann have been disastrously mismanaged and the market has put an end to their follies. But Bush can’t bear to let the market act when it rightly punishes incompetence. To him and his ilk, the”free” in “free market” means only the freedom to succeed; it does not include the freedom to fail. Bush wants to sacrifice America to protect members of his class from failure.

(Of course, the Pelosis and Reids of the world – along with plenty of compliant Republicans – bear much of the blame by encouraging radical organizations like Acorn to push banks into making loans that no sane underwriter would allow.)

The Great Betrayer of America

At a time when left-wing radicals like Al Franken and moveon.org are making an all-out push to oust Republicans from government once and for all (as if they presented an ideological threat to their socialist dreams), Bush is trying to hand them their favorite weapon – class hatred.

In order to seize power, the radical left requires a deep-seated belief that life in America is a zero-sum game. If the rich grow richer, the poor must become poorer. Their entire political life depends on the notion that the only way “working families” can succeed is for the government to take money away from the “rich” and give it to the people who really “deserve” it – people who vote for them.

Liberals will never admit that it is capital – not government – that creates jobs, credit, and opportunities. They will never admit that the whole pie can grow and everyone’s own little slice with it. And they are committed to keeping America ignorant of those simple facts.

Bush has created a new and powerful “Main Street v. Wall Street” class war. He seems determined to prove to the American people that (a) wealthy financiers need to be protected from financial loss, and (b) only government spending can “solve” the problem. This war plays directly into the hands of liberals on both sides of the aisle (especially in the Senate) who hate democracy and hate the limits the Constitution places on their power.

Is there any hope? Not much. Even if sanity prevails and the bailout is somehow averted, Bush will turn over the White House to either McBama or OCain. The Republicans and Democrats will continue to look after their own interests. A return to such archaic ideas as liberty and fiscal sanity would require the American voters to do something they haven’t done in decades. Voters would have to look beyond their own sense of entitlement and the “journalists” who pander to it, and make some tough, responsible decisions.

That seems unlikely. Sadly, John Kennedy’s stirring admonition to ask what we can do for our country has become just another sound bite to be ignored along with the Republican and Democrat candidates’ empty promises.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under Culture, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.