Dean Baker: Bring Back the old George W. Bush

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:


Published on Wednesday, February 7, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Bring Back the Old George W. Bush
by Dean Baker

According to the political pundits, President Bush is adjusting to the Republican Congressional defeat last fall by adopting a more conciliatory posture toward the Democrats. They tell us that he wants to move forward on a bipartisan basis on many of the key problems facing the country.

While bipartisan progress would be encouraging, it is very difficult to see any evidence of compromise from President Bush in key areas of public policy. In fact, in almost every important area, the positions he has adopted since the November election have been more extreme than those he had previously advocated. Most of the public has probably failed to recognize President Bush's sharp turn to the right, because the media has chosen to place more emphasis on his public gestures toward the Democratic leadership than his policy proposals.

In the months since the election, President Bush has escalated the war in Iraq and made serious threats and allegations (unsupported by evidence) that could presage an attack against Iran. He has proposed a health-care reform measure that, as a side effect, would largely wipe out Social Security for low and moderate income workers. President Bush has also proposed gradually phasing out Medicare for middle income retirees over the next 4 or 5 decades. And, he has again proposed little more than talk to combat global warming.

Taking each item in turn, the escalation in Iraq has at least received attention from the media. The escalation is striking because it is not only a repudiation of the Democrats and the decision of the electorate in November, but this policy also directly contradicts the assessment of the foreign policy elites of both political parties, as expressed in the report of the Iraq Study Group. There's not much evidence of reconciliation here. ....(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0207-21.htm

[Prophet 451]

1. Agreed

There was no way Bush was going to be concilitory or bipartisan, he's has too much of an entitlement complex for that. His attitude was always going to be straightforward defiance. You saw it a little when Cheney effectively said they would just ignore Congress.

[Catfight]

2. Shrub sealed his fate when he said he had political capital and he

intended to spend it the way he wanted. He gloated and acted like an obnoxious child chastising the press when they asked a hard question of him. He's no friend of anyone except his cronies, never forget it. He doesn't play nice, he changes the rules so he wins and he cheats to try to win but always coming up the big loser he is.