If this forum?s left-leaning readers wonder why Locker Room scribes have spent little time praising our outgoing 43rd president, they might want to consider the following:
By grafting a prescription-drug entitlement on to Medicare, just as the demographic deluge of the baby boomers’ retirements was beginning, the president expanded the welfare state more than any president since Lyndon Johnson created Medicare in 1965. By signing every grotesque spending measure that arrived on his desk with the support of a majority of congressional Republicans?e.g., the 2002 farm bill that increased corporate welfare for agriculture at a time of record farm profits ?the president committed his party to a situational ethic of governance that amounts to no ethic at all. By signing the McCain-Feingold speech-rationing (a.k.a. “campaign reform”) legislation, the president violated his oath to defend the Constitution. By federalizing the family tragedy of Terri Schiavo, the president and some congressional allies made risible their stock of rhetoric in praise of limited government. By enacting the No Child Left Behind law, which is the thin end of a potentially enormous wedge, the administration licensed potentially unlimited federal supervision of the quintessentially local responsibility of education in grades K through 12, thereby further weakening federalism. And by presiding, in its last four months, over more and more flamboyant government intervention in the economy than at any time in 75 years, the administration completed the GOP’s intellectual disarmament.
The absence of profanity and surrender-first anti-war rhetoric should make clear that the critic cited above is no left-winger. George Will offered that assessment in his latest Newsweek column.
Beyond the grammatically correct sentence construction and the focus on the president?s constitutionally dictated role, Will?s assessment also differs from those on the Left by acknowledging George W. Bush?s key achievement, one which might earn him greater respect in the future: the absence of terrorist attacks on American soil during the past seven years.
