The New Republic

Oh, please. what is with this "Mitt Romney is our last best hope" narrative? if he wins the nomination and the presidency, he'll have to be every bit the nut he is pretending to be to keeep his base happy. Remember the last GOP president we all thought was going to be a moderate, reasonable, compassionate conservative?

- miceelf

March 11, 2011 at 12:37pm

JC, don't make fun of a good band. What did they do to deserve this kind of treatment?

- tmmats

March 11, 2011 at 12:54pm

miceelf: H. W. Bush (who basically was)? His son never, ever came across as moderate, reasonable, or compassionate.

- Jbryan

March 11, 2011 at 12:57pm

JBryan- not to you and certainly not to me, but to the chattering classes, there were a host of profiles of Bush as the least objectionable republican in the group, other than McCain. For that matter, witness the transformation of McCain in the nomination process 8 years later from "moderate maverick" (again, chatterers' characterization, not mine) to completely zany tea party panderer.

- miceelf

March 11, 2011 at 1:17pm

Jbryan, shrub campaigned like he would be a 'uniter, not a divider' and used the phrase 'compassionate conservative' in his 2000 campaign. He constantly talked up how he worked with Democrats in the Texas legislature to make himself sound like a reasonable man. Never mind that what passes for Democrats in Texas these days has nothing to do with the LBJ / Jim Hightower / Ann Richards variety of Democrat. Molly Ivins warned us about him but too few listened.

- tmmats

March 11, 2011 at 1:19pm

Death Cab is way overrated and I say that even though they hail from my region. Who knows what M. Romney might be like as a president. Only the ideologues, that's who. And there are many essentialists out here for whom George Walker Bush was just plain evil. But as a contextualist, I am always surveying the lay of the land. If Bush had not picked Darth Vader to head his search committee for VP and had Vader not picked himself, and had that memo not come in early in W's presidency that said that the Bush camp could prevail by playing to the base, who knows how the Bush Administration would have gone? Bush surely would have never been anything other than a weak, uniformed president, but because he was malleable and uninformed, he was much more open to influence than most all of our presidents have been.

- liberalref

March 11, 2011 at 2:33pm

Dubyah was, rhetoric aside, one of the most left-wing presidents since FDR. Much of the statist explosion that's hung on Obama was initiated by GWB--huge expansion of entitlements, major Federal intrusion into local education (and just about everything else via Homeland Security), huge deficits, a Global War to extend liberal values on credit...folks who thought George W was just going to be Democrat Lite underestimated his commitment to Big Government.

- Robert Powell

March 11, 2011 at 3:00pm

I don't think that GW Bush and his crew were trying to advance liberal values in Iraq. When the invasion turned up no WMDs and the violence began ratcheting up, then the humanitarian talk began in earnest from the administration.

- liberalref

March 11, 2011 at 3:11pm

It's a fringe right wing fantasy that W was left wing. His policies reflected a center-right consensus. Yes, it exploded the deficit, but that's because nearly no one on the right cares about the deficit any more, not because he's secretly left wing (the wing which contains all the actual deficit hawks, natch)

- Simon Greenwood

March 11, 2011 at 3:31pm

I agree Simon, except that I think they do care about the deficit; it just looks like they don't care because their best efforts to address the defecit continue to make it worse and their devotion to their economic ideology blinds them to existential realities.

- GSpinks

March 11, 2011 at 4:02pm

libref, that's all true, which is why my original post was meant simply to point out that the "Mitt Romney will be moderate if president" is a HUGE assumption. your characterization of the Bush presidency strikes me as largely accurate, albeit manichean (Cheney as Vader). But then, the world is manichean sometimes. ;-) I would leave whatever members there are of the "Romney as moderate savior" club to ponder these questions: 1. Is Romney malleable? 2. Are there less malleable elements in his own party that would work to shape his presidency to their liking?

- miceelf

March 11, 2011 at 5:19pm

Thank you for your eloquent and funny post, mice. But I don't think I was at all being Manichaean; I was going the anti-Manichaean route by contextualizing the GW Bush presidency. In using the DV metaphor, I was of course exaggerating for effect. Dick Cheney himself is not a good argument for essentialism. In the 1991 Gulf War, he argued for not going in to Baghdad. Now, he has always been very conservative and he forever argued for increasing executive power. But in foreign affairs he once was much more of a realist, and his metamorphosis caused Brent Scowcroft to say that he didn't know Dick Cheney any longer. So something flipped him, 9/11, I suppose, largely, plus perhaps epiphenomenal effects from his health problems, as our own Michelle Cottle suggested in a great article a number of years back, which sent Charles Krauthammer into orbit, but that I thought was quite plausible.

- liberalref

March 11, 2011 at 6:40pm

I know, libref, just yanking your chain. This is not disputing what you said, but one can be manichean without being essentialist of course. W, himself, who is pretty manichean, bases his belief in his own goodness in his conversion somewhat late in life.

- miceelf

March 11, 2011 at 7:25pm

"And there are many essentialists out here for whom George Walker Bush was just plain evil. But as a contextualist, I am always surveying the lay of the land." "Evil" is a theological/metaphysical quality the belief in which is more or less characteristic of an essentialist few. Forget evil. What George W. Bush was and is is a war criminal, guilty of waging aggressive war in Iraq in violation of international law. To achieve this, he knowingly purveyed falsehoods about Iraq's imminent possession of nuclear weapons, falsehoods known within his own administration to be such. In a just world, he, Cheney, Rumsefeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, et alia would have been tried and convicted in the Hague and be serving life sentences. An essentialist view is that America is essentially good and therefore, by definition, neither it nor its leadership can be guilty of a crime. Evil is not a crime,. Aggressive war is. ____________________ It is by now a standard right-wing rhetorical ploy when right-wing policies, based on fantasy views of the world, go awry to claim that the policy failure was due either to not being sufficiently right-wing or even to implementing left-wing policy. Right-wing policies will always fail, other than by pure chance, because they are based on insane, fantastical beliefs about the world -- tax revenues go up when tax rates go down, Iraqis will strew flowers at the feet of our soldiers, cutting government spending in a recession will increase employment, climate change is due to natural causes, just for a few examples. When you act based on fantasies rather than a serious view of the world as it exists, failure is almost assured, whether you are left, right, or sideways.

- roidubouloi

March 12, 2011 at 10:20am

Agreed, roid.

- liberalref

March 12, 2011 at 12:17pm

Balderdash roi. Cheney, Powell, and eventually Bush 41, were wrong in '91 not to finish the job. Bush 43, with Darth Cheney, made a lame and incompetent try at a do-over in 2003, but eventually the result that was achievable in 1991 was, about a million wasted lives later, more or less achieved in 2010. The one inescapable historical fact is that there was one Iraq War, and it was initiated by the invasion, rape, and annexation by Iraq of the US ally Kuwait. Attempts to characterize the long overdue enforcement of the ceasefire terms of 1991 as a war of aggression are pathetic sophistry.

- Robert Powell

March 12, 2011 at 5:56pm

Sorry Powell, but the historical record is clear that: 1. The second Iraq war was illegal because neither defensive, in response to immediate humanitarian crisis, nor authorized by the UN Security Council. Bush had no authority to enforce anything about the 1991 war 12 years later. That required new Security Council authority that the Security Council declined to provide. Moreover, Bush didn't even dare make his case for war based on ceasefire violations. He made his case on WMD's that he knew did not exist. 2. Bush could never have gained the necessary congressional support merely to finish the job of '91 and he knew it. Thus it was necessary deliberately and falsely to claim that Hussein was imminently in possession of nuclear weapons. The evidence trotted out for this was falsified because there did not exist any real evidence that could have persuaded the American people or the Congress of the urgent need to go to war again in Iraq. 3. Bush lied us into a war that was without legal justification. That is aggressive war. That makes him a war criminal. As well, most of the lives lost were in a war between Iraq and Iran in which we were supporting Hussein in an aggressive war against Iran. Not sure you actually know what sophistry means. Certainly you abuse the term.

- roidubouloi

March 13, 2011 at 12:11am

The vast majority of people believe in a difference between good and evil, not an "essentialist few". Once you said "forget evil" there became no justification for giving a damn about the rest of what you have to say. So what if he broke the law or is a war criminal? If you aren't willing to describe those things as wrong then there's no reason to care about them. Of course, you violate your own relativism by appealing to a "just world" which implicitly relies on believing in right and wrong.

- Simon Greenwood

March 13, 2011 at 12:43pm

Sorry, that's nihilism not relativism. Mea culpa.

- Simon Greenwood

March 13, 2011 at 12:44pm

Depends on which definition of "evil" you are looking to. If you are using good and evil as synonyms for right and wrong than what I said above does not even make sense. If, however, you are using it in the sense in which I think lib intended and I certainly intended -- as an inherent quality of things -- then I think the distinction stands. My whole point is that the intangible quality is meaningless, deeds are what count. People do good things, people do bad things. Some incline to do many more goods things, some to do many more bad things. I see nothing that is added to our understanding by the characterization of one as good the other evil. It is a religious idea that has no use that I can see, and it substitutes for thought about how to behave. In particular, once someone or some group is characterized as "evil" in the sense of a completely corrupt and malign force then there is no limit to what can be done to bring about that person or people's end. A very dangerous idea. One not believe that Bush is good or evil or anything else to commit a war crime. The question is what he did, not what one supposes is "in his heart."

- roidubouloi

March 13, 2011 at 1:58pm

Sorry roi, but the folks who actually keep the historical record, historians, have long since conclusively ruled that any meaningful distinction between "Gulf War I" and "Gulf War II" is entirely artificial. See for example John Keegan, perhaps the best military historian of his generation; Andrew Bacevich on these pages; and others. Then there's the British Parliament, the US Congress, the chief legal officers of both highly legalistic countries, and their colleagues in over a score of other rule-of-law democracies such as Holland, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and etc. Then there's just the common sense reality that no one has ever characterized the enforcement of cease-fire terms as a new war; and the absurdity of declaring "non-war" over a decade of combat operations enforcing an embargo (itself an act of war) that killed perhaps a million innocent Iraqis. To do so requires either monumental ignorance, or bad will. The attempt to sell mind-reading voodoo "insights" into the thought processes of the principles is simply risible. All one needs to do is consult the record on what was actually known in 2002. Nope, there's just no logical explanation for the bizarre insistence of partisan hacks on accusing the US of "aggressive war" in Iraq, except sophistry.

- Robert Powell

March 13, 2011 at 4:40pm