The Ivy League

1942: Yale student George HW Bush joins US Navy, shot down over the Pacific in battle and rescued 2015: Yale students scared of Halloween

— olliander (@ollieblog) November 10, 2015

Obama on Bush Budget Deficit

George W. Bush Throws Out First Pitch at World Series

Bush Vindicated on Wiretaps

When Barack Obama, at his inauguration, took a smarmy swipe at President Bush on the issue of the “rule of law,” he did what liberals typically do.

He assumed that the law means what he wants it to mean.

But Bush, not Obama, was right about the law, at least according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Ever since the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was exposed in 2005, critics have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional. Those allegations rested solely on the fact that the Administration did not first get permission from the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Well, as it happens, the same FISA court would beg to differ.

In a major August 2008 decision released yesterday in redacted form, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the FISA appellate panel, affirmed the government’s Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. The case was not made public before yesterday, and its details remain classified. An unnamed telecom company refused to comply with the National Security Agency’s monitoring requests and claimed the program violated the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on search and seizure.

But the Constitution bans only “unreasonable” search and seizure, not all searches and seizures, and the Fourth Amendment allows for exceptions such as those under a President’s Article II war powers. The courts have been explicit on this point. In 1980, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held in Truong that “the Executive need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance.” The FISA appeals court said in its 2002 opinion In re Sealed Case that the President has “inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information” and took “for granted” that “FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”

Of course, the Clinton administration claimed the authority of conduct searches connected with national security without a warrant.

But the media somehow didn’t remember this when it went ballistic over Bush’s supposed “illegal” wiretapping.

Lesson: the law doesn’t necessarily mean what you want it to mean. To use the concept “rule of law” to bash somebody who simply disagrees with you on policy is the ultimate show of contempt for that concept.

Liberals and the Iraq Surge

From Peter Wehner, writing in Commentary:

In early January 2007, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq war was going moderately badly to very badly. Indeed, the war had been unpopular for much of the previous years, at times deeply so. But by this past September, a nationwide Pew survey found “a striking rise in public optimism about the situation in Iraq.” According to the poll, 58 percent of Americans now believe the war in Iraq is going well or very well, and the same percentage now also say that the U.S. will definitely or probably succeed in Iraq.

This news is encouraging—and not terribly surprising. After all, most Americans have assessed the situation in Iraq based on a reasonable interpretation of events on the ground. And since the January 2007 announcement of the “surge”—President Bush’s decision to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Iraq, armed with a fundamentally new counterinsurgency strategy—the situation on the ground has, by every conceivable measure, improved. In some cases, the progress has been stunning.

And yet, no matter what most American believe or what reality tells us is so, leading liberal observers and politicians, long in the vanguard of opposition to the war, have denounced the surge at every point. Even as some, in the face of overwhelming evidence, have been forced to concede a modicum of American progress, they have done so reluctantly and have downplayed the role played by administration policy in achieving that progress. Others have denied that significant progress has been made at all.

Why they have responded in this way is a question worth exploring. But first it may be useful to establish the record.

The formal inauguration of the surge in January 2007—in announcing it, the President said it would “change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror”—was met by liberal commentators with a skepticism bordering on derision.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post mocked Bush’s “fantasy-based escalation . . . which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.” At Time, Joe Klein ridiculed “Bush’s futile pipe dream.” Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times, found “something genuinely bizarre” about those Americans who actually supported the new strategy. “It is not just that they are wrong. . . . It’s that they are completely detached from reality.” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart predicted that, by 2008, American soldiers would “still be dying, and the catastrophe will still be deepening.” In sending more troops to Baghdad, Beinart wrote, “Bush is showing his commitment to win—except that the United States has already lost.”

Liberal politicians were just as certain that the surge was a doomed and irresponsible policy. On the night of the announcement, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Later in the month, Senator Joseph Biden declared: “If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake.” Senator Hillary Clinton similarly insisted that “I cannot support [the] proposed escalation of the war in Iraq,” while Senator John Kerry said that sending in additional troops was not an “answer” but “a tragic mistake.”

Throughout the spring, even though the full complement of additional troops had yet to arrive in Iraq, the drumbeat of opposition continued, and so did intimations of American defeat. To Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, “the [American] lives lost in Iraq were wasted.” Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, writing in the New York Review of Books, argued that Bush had embraced a plan that “has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference.” On Capitol Hill, Senator Christopher Dodd asserted that “there is no military solution in Iraq. To insist upon a surge is wrong.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared that “this surge is not accomplishing anything” and in April announced flatly that the Iraq war was “lost.”

Two months later, liberal critics of the war remained of the same mind, and were now demanding that we quit the field altogether. According to a July 8 New York Times editorial, the time had come “for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” (This, despite the paper’s acknowledgment in the same editorial that an American pullout was likely to yield “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” not to mention regional chaos and more terrorism.) James Fallows of the Atlantic, a sharp critic of the surge from the outset, wrote that the expectations “being heaped” on it were “simply laughable.”

In August, Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal party, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine with a mea culpa titled “Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment.” Ignatieff wrote:

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a President. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the [2003] invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

In fact, however, far from having turned into an “unfolding catastrophe,” the dream was already getting closer to realization. By the summer of 2007, although Iraq was still in many ways a broken nation, evidence was mounting that the surge was working. In almost no time, sectarian violence had been sharply decreased in Baghdad, and the provinces of Anbar and Diyala were being reclaimed. Coalition forces were making huge headway in human intelligence, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the run.

By September, General David Petraeus was reporting substantial progress in Iraq, but the liberals simply refused to believe it.

But none of this mattered to the administration’s liberal critics, who to their earlier prognosis of failure were now adding charges of government cooking of the evidence. Even before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic majority whip, warned Americans that “by carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.” After the hearing, Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the general’s testimony was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” To Representative Rahm Emanuel, the general’s written report deserved to win “the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction.”

Paul Krugman, an influential columnist for the New York Times, could not have agreed more. The administration, he flatly asserted, was intentionally misleading the public by “creating the perception that the ‘surge’ is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.” Others were even more reckless. A Democratic Senator complained to the website Politico that no one was willing to call Petraeus “a liar on national TV,” hoping instead that “outside groups will do this for us.” As if in response, MoveOn.org, the left-wing political-action committee, promptly took out a full-page ad in the New York Times proposing, in giant type, a new name for General Petraeus: “General Betray Us.”

It was a pretty sordid performance, and a stunning example of chosed-mindedness.

But why? Wehner has two hypotheses.

A generous interpretation is that by the end of 2006, many liberals had made a definitive good-faith judgment that the Iraq war was irretrievably lost. This then became the filter through which they viewed all later developments. Once convinced of the impossibility of substantial progress, never mind a decent outcome or an actual victory, they could not help receiving good news as anomalous and/or inherently unsustainable.

But then Wehner suggests this interpretation is too generous.

Enter, ignominiously, politics. For some liberals, hatred of the President was clearly so all-encompassing that they had developed a deep investment in the failure of what they habitually dismissed not as America’s war but as “Bush’s war.”

In short, liberals and leftists were consumed with a hatred of Bush, and could not bear the thought that the war would be a success.

Liberals will claim, if they admit they hate Bush at all, that they hate him because of the policies he has pursued. But the simple fact is that Bush hatred is cultural. Liberals don’t start with liberal policy preferences and hate Bush because he is a conservative. That could not possibly explain the depth of the hatred.

Rather, the hatred is cultural. As we explained to the Associated Press in 2004:

John McAdams, a political scientist at Marquette University, said resentment of Bush is particularly strong among liberals who already hold three things against him: “First, he’s a conservative. Second, he’s a Christian. And third, he’s a Texan. When you add all of those things up, that invokes pretty much every symbol of the cultural wars.”

“It’s particularly galling when somebody who mangles his syntax and doesn’t pronounce words extremely well and is from Texas beats you,” McAdams added.

This cultural hatred of Bush has not merely led to liberals wanting the Bush presidency to fail.

It has led to liberals wanting America to lose the war.

Obama: May Prosecute Members of Bush Administration for “War Crimes”

We blogged about this back in April, but it has come up again.

From Patrick McIlheran, how the candidate of getting beyond divisiveness and achieving national unity would treat members of the Bush Administration.

From the blog of Will Bunch:

Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race -- and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

And then Bunch goes on to quote Obama directly:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law -- and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

Let’s see: a party loses an election. Members of that party are put on trial by the new regime, and punished for this or that supposed “crime.”

What kind of government is that? Not a democracy.

But then, given the friends that Obama has, why wouldn’t we expect this from him?

So Much for the “Bush Lied” Delusions

It’s an indicator of how demented a lot of liberals and leftists are that they claim that “Bush lied” about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.

Usually, these are the folks who think Bush is stupid. But here they are positing that Bush was brilliant, that he read the intelligence better than the CIA or Congressional Democrats (some of whom were on the Intelligence Committee and had virtually the same access that Bush did) or Bill Clinton or British intelligence . . . and on and on.

The reality, of course, is that the entire world was fooled, but not by Bush.

From CBS News:

(CBS) Saddam Hussein initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen. The Iraqi dictator revealed this thinking to George Piro, the FBI agent assigned to interrogate him after his capture.

Piro, in his first television interview, relays this and other revelations to 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley this Sunday, Jan. 27, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Piro spent almost seven months debriefing Saddam in a plan based on winning his confidence by convincing him that Piro was an important envoy who answered to President Bush. This and being Saddam’s sole provider of items like writing materials and toiletries made the toppled Iraqi president open up to Piro, a Lebanese-American and one of the few FBI agents who spoke Arabic.

“He told me he initially miscalculated... President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 . . . a four-day aerial attack,” says Piro. “He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.” “He didn’t believe the U.S. would invade?” asks Pelley, “No, not initially,” answers Piro.

Once the invasion was certain, says Piro, Saddam asked his generals if they could hold the invaders for two weeks. “And at that point, it would go into what he called the secret war,” Piro tells Pelley. But Piro isn’t convinced that the insurgency was Saddam’s plan. “Well, he would like to take credit for the insurgency,” says Piro.

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD…to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

Saddam, of course, had a history of misjudging presidents named Bush. Perhaps, in 1990, when he invaded Kuwait, it could be seen as a reasonable gamble that the U.S. would no nothing. But Saddam refused to back down even when Bush had a half-million troops in the region poised to invade.

You don’t just back down and say “never mind” after you have done that, and Bush didn’t. Of course, Saddam might have believed, in 2002/2003 as in 1990/1991 that any willingness to back down or give in would undermine his hold on power.

If so, that kind of thinking cost him his life.

Tough Act

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Is Respect for Life “Ideology?”

From Jeff Jacoby, discussing President Bush’s veto of a bill that would fund embryonic stem cell research, using cells derived from killing embryos.

Jacoby, he makes clear, differs from Bush on this issue. But he respects the president’s logic.

A human embryo is not just another lab supply or raw material, to be manipulated or destroyed at will. Even in nascent form, human life must be treated with dignity and care. How and under what circumstances embryos can be harvested for their stem cells are not just scientific questions. First they are questions of ethics and morality, and of the values we wish to live by.

Or are they? To judge from the criticism of Bush’s stem cell veto last week, nothing outranks the claims of science, and only a zealot could think otherwise.

“With one pen stroke,” charged Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, “President Bush has ignored hard science, embraced misplaced ideology, and turned his back on the millions who stand to benefit from . . . stem cell research.”

Similarly, Senate majority leader Harry Reid blasted Bush for “putting the politics of his narrow ideology ahead of saving lives.”

So did Senator Hillary Clinton: “This is just one example of how the president puts ideology before science.”

And Senator Barack Obama: “The promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgment of science, and we deserve a president who will put that judgment first.”

What these statements have in common is their use of “ideology” as a pejorative for the principles and ethical values that have guided Bush’s thinking on the stem cell issue. They treat “science” as an unqualified good, and reproach the White House for letting ethical qualms impede scientific progress. Yet not all science is progress, and not all ethical qualms are impediments.

It is for man to master science, not the other way around. Unfettered scientific investigation isn’t always morally neutral, nor a sufficient end in and of itself. We all want diseases to be cured and lives to be prolonged, but there are ethical limits to how far we can go in acquiring knowledge that may one day save human life. Embryonic stem cell research, as Bush notes, is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards. It is not blind “ideology” to say so.

“You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, a physician and former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, last January. “You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem cell research advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. . . . The slope is very slippery.”

I wouldn’t have vetoed the bill Bush rejected. Nevertheless, I appreciate his effort to block that slippery slope. As science tugs us toward a brave new world of manufactured human life, it is more urgent than ever that moral boundaries not be ignored when biomedical public policy is made.

It’s a bit ironic that proponents of embryonic stem cell research call opposition to their agenda “ideology.” In reality, science has it’s own ideology. That ideology says “if we can do it, we should do it, and moral scruples be damned.”

Science also has its own set of vested interests. There is potentially vast wealth to be made from stem cells, and it’s ironic that the sort of liberals who are happy to bash pharmaceutical companies for their “excess profits” and who want to regulate all kinds of other economic activity are laissez-faire people on this.

But actually, they aren’t laissez-faire people. Nothing in the Bush policy prevents private individuals or corporations from funding stem cell research. These folks want a taxpayer subsidy.

Media Bias in Europe: Worse than the U.S.?

American conservatives can get to exercised about liberal media bias in the U.S. that we sometimes forget that it’s even worse elsewhere.

Like Europe, for example.

Via NewsBusters, an example from the war in Afghanistan.

Reporter Michael Fumento, embedded with U.S. forces in that war, describes two Associated Press reporters from Spain.

One of the AP reporters says he believes 9/11 was a Bush administration conspiracy hung on al Qaeda. . . . I don’t hear the other reporter sound out on the subject, but he never takes off his Che Guevara T-shirt. Maybe these two will provide unbiased footage and commentary notwithstanding their personal views--maybe not.

When liberals here in the U.S. proudly proclaim that President Bush is vastly unpopular in Europe, and therefore is a bad person and a bad president, they are ignoring that Europeans are judging him based on what they see in their media.

Biased media produces biased opinions. This can be counterbalanced by a diversity of media sources. But when it’s not what the people believe -- especially on matters far from their personal experiences -- will simply reflect what the media tell them.

Indeed, negative opinions of Bush around the world are the result of a (literally) unholy alliance. Secular leftists who dominate the media in Europe dislike him because he’s a conservative, but also (probably to a greater degree) because he’s a Christian and a Texan.

In the Muslim world, they hate him because he is allied with Israel.

But neither the secular Europeans nor the anti-Israel Muslims have any particular moral authority.

George Bush: Carter is Best Former President

From Scrapple Face:

(2007-05-20) — Just a day after former President Jimmy Carter told reporters that the Bush administration is “the worst in history” the current White House resident called Mr. Carter “the best former president ever.”

“I know that President Carter and I have had our differences,” said Mr. Bush, “But I think most Americans will agree with me that he’s a terrific ex-president. Things have never been better since Jimmy Carter left office.”

Mr. Bush pointed to an array of improvements, including a stable growing economy, lower taxes, reduced inflation and unemployment and increased American strength and preparedness — all of which he associated with Mr. Carter’s years as a former president.

“I think history will judge President Carter’s post-White House tenure favorably,” said Mr. Bush, “As a former president, Mr. Carter has overseen the nation’s longest period of expansion and growth in opportunity.”

How Do You Fight a War When the Opposition Party Hates Your Guts?

Another perceptive column from Jeff Jacoby.

But to a large extent, the Democrats’ lack of seriousness about the war we are in can only be explained by Bush Derangement Syndrome. The term was coined by commentator Charles Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, who defines it as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay, the very existence of George W. Bush.”

What if not derangement can explain such fever-swamp nuttiness as the findings of a new Rasmussen poll, which asked whether Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance? Among Democrats, 35 percent believe he did know and another 26 percent weren’t sure. Only 39 percent said he didn’t. In other words, nearly two out of three Democrats are unwilling to say that Bush wasn’t tipped off to 9/11 in advance.

In another poll recently, respondents were asked whether they personally wanted Bush’s new security strategy in Iraq to succeed -- not whether they expected it to, but whether they wanted it to. Among Democrats, a stunning 49 percent either hope that the United States will be defeated in Iraq or can’t decide one way or the other. Only 51 percent, a bare majority, want the American effort against al-Qaeda in Iraq to end in victory.

As long as the 43rd president remains in office, it seems, a significant number of Americans will be so consumed with Bush-hatred that they will be unable to acknowledge -- let alone help defeat -- the real evil that confronts us all. Will they come to their senses after Jan. 20, 2009? And even if they do, will it be too late?

There is in fact little hope that the Democrats, should they win the presidency in 2008, will begin to act better.

They are so utterly invested in wanting this war lost that they will fall all over themselves surrendering.

Not Your Job, Nancy

That’s Known as a Euphemism

John Edwards: I Voted For the War Because I Was Burdened With Information

From Althouse, a particularly dumb comment from Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on “Meet the Press.”

Edwards, who now vehemently opposes the war, is confronted with the fact that Barack Obama opposed the war at a time when Edwards was voting for it.

He wasn’t burdened like a lot of us with the information that we were receiving on the intelligence committee and as members of the United States Senate. We were getting very detailed, intimate information about what was actually happening in Iraq.

Yes, Senator, you were. And it led you to favor the war. And your opposition now looks opportunistic.

Interestingly, Edwards doesn’t claim that the Bush Administration bears the responsibility for hoodwinking him.

SEN. EDWARDS: For the same reason a lot of people were wrong. You know, we — the intelligence information that we got was wrong. I mean, tragically wrong. On top of that I’d — beyond that, I went back to former Clinton administration officials who gave me sort of independent information about what they believed about what was happening with Saddam’s weapon—weapons programs. They were also wrong.

[. . .]

I’m not defending what I did. Because what happened was the information that we got on the intelligence committee was, was relatively consistent with what I was getting from former Clinton administration officials.

All this, of course, is perfectly consistent with saying that Bush made a mistake invading Iraq. But it’s not consistent with saying he was some sort of Machiavellian manipulator.