Grover Norquists bailout letter to Presdient Bush

Tom Wolfe - In Defense of George W. Bush

Complete video at:





Acclaimed author Tom Wolfe offers a defense of the much-maligned 43rd President of the United States.

This program was recorded as a part of the Hoover Institution's interview series, "Uncommon Knowledge."

-----

Peter Robinson engages America’s master novelist in a conversation that ranges from the death of the American novel to the "charming aristocracy" that seeks to dictate literary standards to the intersection of culture and the latest findings in neuroscience.

Along the way, Tom Wolfe reaffirms his place as the preeminent chronicler of the changing American scene - Hoover Institution

Dr. Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe is an American author and journalist, best known as one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tom Wolfe is the author of many books including I Am Charlotte Simmons, Hooking Up, A Man in Full, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Purple Decades, From Bauhaus to Our House, In Our Time, The Right Stuff, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, The Painted Word, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Peter M. Robinson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics, edits Hoover's quarterly journal, the Hoover Digest, and hosts Hoover's television program, Uncommon Knowledge.

Robinson is also the author of three books: How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life; It's My Party: A Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP; and the best-selling business book Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MB.

Sunset On The Clinton Era

Sunset On The Clinton Era
By Christopher Adamo

Momentarily setting aside the tragic impact on America, should Barack Obama be elected president, it is nonetheless worthwhile to ponder the significance of Hillary Clinton’s announcement last Saturday that she is dropping out of the presidential race. To be precise, she is “suspending” her campaign which, considering the history of the Clinton dynasty, could indicate that in her mind, this contest is not yet settled.

Nevertheless, her announcement highlights an awareness on her part that, at least for the moment, she cannot succeed in a toe-to-toe contest against Obama. So despite the many ominous circumstances facing this country, heartland America can heave a collective sigh of relief. The nightmare of the Clinton epoch appears to be over. Indeed, Obama’s empty rhetoric about “change and hope” belies his intellectually vacant political philosophy. But in light of past experience with the Clintons and their reputation of promoting themselves at everyone else’s expense, almost any “change” would seem to portend an improvement.

From the moment she burst upon the national scene in 1992, Hillary Clinton displayed an understanding of the qualities necessary for political dominance in an environment where the law represents a mere obstacle to the aspirations and methods of the blindly ambitious. On more than one occasion during her Congressional testimonies, she all but challenged her inquisitors with her audacious “I do not recall” responses, mocking them and essentially daring them to resort to increase the heat in efforts to make her confess to wrongdoing.

As this facet of the Clinton scheme played out, the truth became completely irrelevant. Instead of matters being determined on the basis of facts, things degenerated into a battle of nerves which she knew she would win.

Clearly, she was the driving force behind the Clintonian strategy of flouting the law not only as a means of ensuring a particular end, but as a challenge to any who might take exception. In essence her actions announced “This is my plan. Interfere at your own risk.” Time and again, her method paid off handsomely. Few on the Republican side of the aisle had the resolve to stand against her. And as the impeachment debacle proved, those who attempted to do so were all too often undermined by fellow “Republicans.”

The most unfortunate aspect of the situation as it currently stands is that it took a Democrat to shatter Hillary’s concocted aura of invincibility. Midway through Bill Clinton’s second term, it became obvious that Hillary had her sights on the White House, and would stop at nothing to get there. Reacting to her telegraphed ambitions, much of the Republican Party has been running terrified ever since, essentially accepting the notion of her “invincibility,” and politicking on that basis, often at the expense of its own governing philosophies.

Throughout the final term of George W. Bush’s presidency, and particularly after the dismal 2006 midterm elections, much of the leadership of the GOP has been fixated only on one thing, how to prevail against the presumably unstoppable Hillary juggernaut. Had Republicans shown a bit more collective spine, and not let themselves be so intimidated by her now thoroughly discredited persona of political prowess, they might well have pursued a proactive agenda touting traditional conservative principles to much greater benefit for the nation as well as to their own political fortunes.

Even the field of Republican presidential candidates who ended up running, along with some whose names were floated for several years prior to the race, often reflected a myopic strategy of prevailing over Hillary’s “super candidate” persona instead of establishing a rallying point for real conservatives.

Among others, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was suggested, not for her leadership qualities or a conservative political philosophy that could resonate with the Republican grassroots, but merely on the basis that being a woman, she might somehow neutralize Hillary’s strongest (we were told) suit. In the process, Republicans forgot to formulate campaigns that truly embodied the winning Republican/conservative principles of smaller government, and support for the moral fabric of a healthy society that enables it to flourish and prosper without the intrusions of the nanny state.

Ironically, the entire air of Clintonian political radiance was, from the beginning, merely a media fabrication. Bill won his two presidential elections with less than half of the smallest voter turnout in nearly a century. And Hillary vaulted into the United States Senate merely as a result of Rudy Giuliani’s untimely bout with prostate cancer. Only a cowardly opposition would grant them political dominance under such circumstances. But, being the opportunists that they are, the Clintons recognized that such was precisely the nature of their Republican adversaries.

Many politicians lie, but the Clintons raised the behavior to an overt level previously unseen, even in Washington. Many politicians engage in shady dealings, but the Clintons flagrantly consorted with the Communist Chinese and their Indonesian surrogates, simply ignoring cries of outrage as literal bags of dirty money passed into their hands. And many politicians attempt to intimidate their opposition, but the Clintons did so by brazenly involving the FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies as they attempted to destroy any who stood in their way.

Washington, and indeed the nation, have been irreparably changed by the Clintons. The “hardball” politics of the past has given way to Congressional “debates” in which facts and truth are irrelevant. Conventions that recognized the need to stand unified against the threats of foreign adversaries have putrefied and degenerated to a level where in their quest for power the Democrats now voice overt sympathies towards America’s mortal enemies while castigating the U.S. military on specious and often totally contrived grounds.

So, despite the myriad of perils that the nation faces, it is nonetheless fitting that at this precipitous time, the Clintons are being unceremoniously expelled by the pitiless political monster they worked so feverishly to create.

About the author
Christopher Adamo is a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance

PEGGY NOONAN: Bush destroyed the Republican Party...

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
By PEGGY NOONAN
January 25, 2008; Page W14

We begin, as one always must now, again, with Bill Clinton. The past week he has traveled South Carolina, leaving discord in his wake. Barack Obama, that "fairytale," is low, sneaky. "He put out a hit job on me." The press is cruelly carrying Mr. Obama's counter-jabs. "You live for it."

In Dillon, S.C., according to the Associated Press, on Thursday Mr. Clinton "predicted that many voters will be guided mainly by gender and race loyalties" and suggested his wife may lose Saturday's primary because black voters will side with Mr. Obama. Who is raising race as an issue? Bill Clinton knows. It's the press, and Mr. Obama. "Shame on you," Mr. Clinton said to a CNN reporter. The same day the Web site believed to be the backdoor of the Clinton war room unveiled a new name for the senator from Illinois: "Sticky Fingers Obama."

Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.

There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."

That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.

Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It's all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.

But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we've done for you?

Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.

As for the Republicans, their slow civil war continues. The primary race itself is winnowing down and clarifying: It is John McCain versus Mitt Romney, period. At the same time the conservative journalistic world is convulsed by recrimination and attack. They're throwing each other out of the party. Republicans have become very good at that. David Brooks damns Rush Limbaugh who knocks Bill Kristol who anathematizes whoever is to be anathematized this week. This Web site opposes that magazine.

The rage is due to many things. A world is ending, the old world of conservative meaning, and ascendancy. Loss leads to resentment. Different pundits back different candidates. Some opportunistically discover new virtues in candidates who appear at the moment to be winning. Some feel they cannot be fully frank about causes and effects.

More on that in a moment.

I saw Mr. McCain this Tuesday in New York, at a fund-raiser at which a breathless aide shared, "We just made a million dollars." What a difference a few wins makes. There were a hundred people outside chanting, "Mac is back!" and perhaps a thousand people inside, crammed into a three-chandelier ballroom at the St. Regis. When I attended a fund-raiser in October there was none of this; perhaps 200 came, and people were directed to crowd around the candidate as if to show he had support. Now you had to fight your way through a three-ring cluster. (When I attended a Giuliani fund-raiser this summer I saw something I wish I'd noted: The audience was big but wasn't listening. They were all on their BlackBerrys. That should have told me something about his support.)

Mr. McCain is in the middle of a shift. Previous strategy: I'm John McCain and you know me, we've traveled through history together. New strategy: I'm the old vet who fought on the front lines of the Reagan-era front, and I am about to take on the mantle of the essentials of conservatism—lower spending, smaller government, strong in the world. He is going to strike the great Reagan gong, not in a way that is new but in a way that is new for him.

In this he is repositioning himself back to where he started 30 years ago: as a Southwestern American conservative veteran of the armed forces. That is, inherently if not showily, anti-establishment. That is, I am the best of the past.

Mr. Romney, on the other hand, is running as I Am Today. I am new and fresh, in fact I'm tomorrow, I know all about the international flow of money and the flatness of the world, I know what China is, I can see you through the turbulence just as I saw Bain to success.

It will all come down to: Whom do Republicans believe? Mr. Romney in spite of his past and now-disavowed liberal positions? Or Mr. McCain in spite of his forays, the past 10 years, into a kind of establishment mindset that has suggested that The Establishment Knows Best?

Do conservatives take inspiration from Mr. Romney's newness? Or do they take comfort and security from Mr. McCain's rugged ability to endure, and to remind?

It is along those lines the big decision will be made.

On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"

This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.

And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.

I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It's not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn't work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That's the way to help.