John Podhoretz's Book: 'Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane'

Source: NewsMax.com "'Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane'" by Phil Brennan
February 23, 2004 http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/2/22/135030.shtml

It appears that Joan Walsh of Salon.com thought she was a pretty smart cookie, parading her Scholastic Aptitude Test score of 1200 as proof. Like many of her media colleagues she considered President Bush’s intellectual level far below her own.

It came as something of a shock for her to learn that the 17-year-old Bush’s SAT score was the same as hers – 1200 – and scored at a time when that was a very hard level to reach.

In his new book, "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane," widely acclaimed New York Post columnist John Podhoretz uses this story to hammer away at the common liberal misconception that this man who learned to fly a complicated and dangerous piece of machinery – the F-102 fighter – was rated as a superior pilot, got an MBA, ran a Major League Baseball team and made millions for his partners, and won two terms as governor of Texas is really quite stupid.

Podhoretz demolishes this Bush-is-a-moron myth, which he calls "Crazy Liberal Idea #1," and goes on to dismember seven other Crazy Liberal Ideas, doing so with a razor-sharp wit and driving his points home with the obvious relish that comes from skewering a very skewerable left.

George W. Bush, he writes, came into office believing he was put on Earth to do two things: to lead the United States into the third millenium with all its terrifying challenges and wondrous opportunities, and to drive liberals insane.

Bush, he adds, "is succeeding brilliantly at both."

His claim that Bush is one of the nation’s greatest presidents is bound to drive liberals mad, but he lays out a stunning profusion of the president’s accomplishments as proof of his contention.

In just three years, Bush has led the nation into two wars, ousted two of the world's most barbaric regimes, redirected U.S. foreign policy to confront the threat of rogue states possessing weapons of mass destruction, daringly embarked on a campaign to introduce democracy into the Middle East, and reconstructed both the military and the executive branch of government.

Moreover, as Podhoretz notes, he shoved two huge tax cuts down the throats of a Congress that traditionally has preferred to spend the people’s money rather than permit then to spend it themselves, and in the process revived an economy that began to slump at the end of the Clinton administration.

The List Goes On

Bush has run circles around the Democrats, co-opting many of their pet programs in such fields as education and health care. He has been deft in dealing with hot-button issues, seeking new ways to handle those that previously have defied all efforts of compromise between right and left.

"Taken together, all of Bush’s presidential qualities mark him as a genuine leader and a transformative figure on the American and world stages," Podhoretz insists. "Love him or hate him, respect him or revile him, George W. Bush has made extraordinary use of the powers of the presidency and has changed the United States, its government and the world in ways that have made an indelible mark on the new century."

We are indeed, he writes, "living in Bush Country."


Having dealt with Bush’s extraordinary record, Podhoretz now begins to enjoy himself chopping away at those eight crazy liberal ideas.

The first, that Bush is a moron, seems rooted in the president’s tendency to mangle the mother tongue. He believes that the "chattering classes" look down on Bush because he does not "accord with the reigning cultural affect. ..."

An Age of Cleverness

"We pride ourselves on self-aware displays of cleverness, constant references to popular culture and the latest trends and a hunger for sharing the trivia we know with others," he writes.

Bush, it seems, is simply not au fait with the things that really matter, such as the latest trends in culinary consumption, cinema and up-to-date slang. He recalls with satisfaction Bush's rejoinder to Chris Matthews when it was suggested that he claimed an abiding interest in the life of Winston Churchill simply to impress Churchill fan Matthews:

"Do you think that I’d take time out of my life to research what the hell you like?" he asked.

Podhoretz also reminds us that Democrats automatically label Republican presidents as dunces – Ike and Reagan especially were seen by the chatterers as less than bright.

He is unrelenting in demolishing those Crazy Liberal Ideas. He shows how asinine is idea #2 – that Bush is a puppet – and demonstrates convincingly that Bush is his own man.

What really controls W, in Podhoretz’s view, is a determination to put America back on the road to the shining city on the hill paved by Ronald Reagan. The author devotes a chapter to showing how W has worked to bring back Reaganism and explains that the two presidents have much in common.

The primary project of the Bush presidency is the completion of the political reconstruction of national politics, government and policy begun by Ronald Reagan in 1981. And this, he writes, is "doubtless what his partisan enemies fear most about him."

Crazy Liberal Idea #3: "Bush is a fanatic."

Podhoretz notes that W’s foes say he "is a reactionary both politically and theologically and that he is effecting a religious takeover of the United States and imposing his doctrinal fanaticism on the rest of the world."

Man of Faith

Nonsense, says Podhoretz. Bush is "an elected politician who happens to be religious," and as a man of faith he is informed by a powerful sense of right and wrong and good and evil." That, of course, is what upsets his paganistic critics, who believe there are no such categories as right and wrong or good and evil; everything is relative.

Crazy Liberal Idea #4: Bush is another Hitler, but not as talented.

The real insult here is that if Bush is Hitler, the United States is Nazi Germany. And that idea, he writes, is born from Europe’s "blind and unreasoning, ugly and unjust, foul and fetid hatred of America" and picked up by the Europhile chattering classes.

Podhoretz deals with other such provably idiotic charges as Crazy Liberal Idea # 5: Bush isn’t protecting the American people, #6: Bush wants to bankrupt the government, #7: Bush is a cowboy and #8: Bush is a liar.

As we head into the election, Podhoretz has shown us exactly how to deal with all the Crazy Liberal Ideas that constitute the Democratic Party’s real platform. All Democrats have in their political arsenal is a hodgepodge of crazy ideas, distortions and lies – and Podhoretz shows us how to disarm them easily.


Source: NewsMax.com "The Democratic Party Platform: Hate Bush" by Phil Brennan February 24, 2004 http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/2/24/111841.shtml

Joyce Notes: Not surprising. The rabid Democrats are "scraping the bottom of the barrel" and in their desperation for more power they will viciously smear. It's obvious that the Democrat party is stuck in the world of pre-September 11th. They have no policy to propose other then the same old outdated stuff so they only flat-out oppose everything without offering any substitute. The Democrat's basicly whine and stamp their foot "NO!! It's my way [??] or no way!"


The Democratic Party Platform: Hate Bush

What is motivating the Democrats is not the economy or the war in Iraq but nothing other than sheer and irrational hatred of President Bush says John Podhoretz, author of "Bush Country – How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane."

In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, Podhoretz tackled what he believes will be the Democrat’s strategy in their all out effort to defeat the President in November.

He cited the non-issue of the President's now well-documented service in the National Guard as one example.

"I think that the issue is part of the way in which the crazy liberal assaults on Bush which have been bubbling around in the swamps of anti-Bush madness, and ended up ultimately in the mouth of Michael Moore. It's a prime example of how the insane Bush hatred has made it from the fever swamps of the left into the mainstream."

The idea that that everything is wrong about somebody who served in the National Guard and got an honorable discharge is born out of nothing less than hatred, Podhoretz charged. "It's distasteful that even something as non-controversial as his service in the Guard should become the object of smears, of conspiracy theorizing and soto voce accusations of document destruction and dishonesty and string pulling."

Even more outrageous, he added are claims that Bush committed crimes that are punishable by death. "Michael Moore said that he was a deserter – that’s a crime punishable by death in the time of war, and Al Gore basically accused him of treason, which is also a crime punishable by death.

"There you have what is unbalanced, unhinged hatred of Bush bubbling up and becoming part of the general discussion."

Tragically, he says, the political strategy driving the issue has been partly successful for the last few weeks. "It's clearly thrown the White House on the defensive. As a political tactic you could say that it's the first successful one that Terry McAuliffe has ever been involved with.

"Lets us presume for the sake of argument that he did not serve in the National guard heroically. The standard now is that in the liberal political culture that once presumed that it was morally superior to have evaded service in Vietnam because the war was unjust, now expects a level of service in Vietnam that must only have been heroic in order to be legitimate.

"Which is like saying O.K., Bush was discharged honorably but what happened in Alabama? Why isn’t he in Alabama? And there’s John Kerry – look what he did. They have put themselves in a position of judging the degree and quality of Bush’s service, which is disgusting."

While accepting Kerry's commendable record of service in Vietnam, however, Podhoretz said he feels justified in judging his conduct after the war which involved "libeling and defaming hundreds of thousands of American fighting men by accusing them of committing non-existent war crimes and atrocities. Whatever George Bush has done in his life, he has never gone around talking about his countrymen in such a repugnant way."

Podhoretz commented on John Edwards' recent revival of the old canard that "Children are going to bed hungry" at a time when liberals are going around shrieking that there is an epidemic of obesity among America’s children.

"What you're dealing with here is a partisan effort to portray America in the era of George W. Bush as a desperately bad place that requires leadership change to save it. It’s up to the voters to determine when they hear nonsense like that if it is nonsense.

"I find it hard to believe that in a country where the economy is growing by more than 4 percent annually, where the unemployment rate is below 6 percent when in recessions it was at 7 and 10 percent – that this economy resembles the economy in the great depression. I don’t think the voters are that stupid.

"If you take the economic realities of the U.S. – that we have a median income of $47,000 a year - what you need to do to combat those facts is to create the rhetorical conditions for making the claim that this is a bad situation.

"So what you try to do if you're Edwards or Kerry is highlight economic uncertainties – so there's some manufacturing jobs lost – so some jobs are being outsourced. You try to convince people that the manufacturing job loss is a catastrophe and that the outsourcing is only the beginning of the destruction of the job base here in America."

Podhoretz cited the current economic facts the Democrats have to counter.


"There are 136 million people employed, which is more than have ever been employed in the history of the United States. There are 281 million people in the U.S. according to the last census. We have millions of illegal aliens working because Americans won’t do the jobs that illegal aliens are happy to take. So the actual number of employed is probably well over 140 million."

In an economy that grew in the third quarter by the fastest rate in 20 years, the Democrats have somehow to convince people that all this is bad, If they succeed, they will also have succeeded in convincing me that the American people are stupid. But the American people are not stupid."

Even the Democratic primary voters proved they aren't stupid, he said. "They had this moment where had to make a choice whether not they were going to march themselves down the road into total destruction by picking Howard Dean as their nominee, and they woke up and said 'no, we're not.'"


Another hurdle the Democrats face is the conviction of the American people that George Bush is a strong leader. "What they need to do is anything that could make him seem as if he isn't.

"They are going to hammer him on the fiction that he hasn’t told the truth, which is why they are desperate for these reports about 9/11 and the intelligence failure to come out so they could pore through them looking for sentences where they can say see he looks like he’s strong but actually he was worse than weak.

The campaign, he predicts is going to get "very very ugly because of the Bush hatred I wrote about in the book. There's going to be pressure from the Bush haters – malicious materials, rumors and stuff like that that is going to float to the surface and it’s going to be used against him."

Podhoretz concluded by warning his fellow conservatives who are unhappy with some of the Presidents policies and speaking out against him that they are doing the Democrat's dirty work for them.