Why This President Has Lost My Vote (At Least For Now)
by Jim Bentley

The Farm Bill, Education Bill, Medicare Bill, Judicial Appointments, New Tone, GOP party chairman's visit to New Hampshire, Spending, Michigan Affirmative Action Case, Immigration proposal, and God only knows what will come next. This president has lost my vote.

Can he get it back? Of course he can, but he will have to work hard for it. I was easy to convince the first time, four years ago. I will be much harder to convince this time. You see, I am a Reaganite, a social and fiscal conservative, a republican with a little r. I believe in the Jeffersonian ideal. That power should rest in the hands of the people, then the local government, then the state government, and then, when there is no other recourse, the national government, in that order. I abhor the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society.

As "Mad" Eddie Chiles said, "I only want three things from the government; protect the borders, deliver the mail, and get the hell out of the way."

While he was still Governor of Texas, I was as excited as any Bushie that he might seek the White House. He had been a fine Governor, his leadership was strong and his ability to reach across the aisle and work with the opposition party for the betterment of Texas showed great promise for the future.

Since then what has President Bush done? He has allowed discretionary spending to rise at a rate that would have made Roosevelt, Johnson, and Clinton blush. He has nominated justices to the Supreme Court and let them twist in the wind. He has made war on terrorists in the name of supporting freedom, and left inconvenient self determination movements to wither. After Republicans for decades supported the devolving of power to the state and local governments, Ted Kennedy gets to write the Education Bill and set national standards in education. The national chairman of the G.O.P. goes to New Hampshire and tells conservatives that they can lump it if they don't like it, because it's not like they have anywhere else to go. Then conservatives in the United States House of Representatives are threatened if they don't get onboard for the Medicare disaster.

From the beginning I should have been skeptical. I wasn't. I should have seen it coming. The reign of President George the Younger is nothing more than an extension of the term of President George the Elder, same cast of characters, same desire to win with no clear plan as to what is to be accomplished once the victory is won. In his 1989 inaugural address, with President Ronald Reagan seated behind him, George the First stood and repudiated the previous eight years with the deceptively simple line, "a kinder, gentler America". Later he took action against Iraq and yielding American sovereignty and national interests to the coalition and United Nations, quit with the job half done. At home he handed the reigns of government to a man with the morals of an alley cat and the intellectual depth of a Petri dish when he yielded to his opponents, raised taxes and grew the government behemoth. As if seizing more monies from taxpayers has ever reduced spending or deficits. He got what he deserved, and we paid the price.

Among George the Second's non conservative opponents there is the mantra that the war in Iraq is his way of finishing what his father started. Payback and vindication? Perhaps, but not for the reasons those people mean it. For this administration is quite simply an extension of the reign of George the First. I do not mean to imply that George the Elder is the man behind the curtain. George the Younger is his own man with his own ideas and methods. However, many of these ideas and methods are, quite naturally, the same as his father's. They, like the rest of us, trust only their close friends and associates. It is just that for these two presidents, it is the same list of people. In Iraq, we really are finishing the job that was started years ago, and if that was where we stopped with completing George the First's agenda I would not be writing this piece. I wish it was a war for oil, then my check-book wouldn't't be hurting so badly now.

George the First appointed David Souter to the Supreme Court; we all know how well that went. George the Second has nominated judges with a rightward frame of mind. These appointments have raised the ire of Senate Democrats. These people had to be stopped, they thought. Why, they actually think the law means what the Founders and succeeding legislatures had written, not the liberal mantra of the moment. Senate Democrats have disingenuously pointed out that they had approved some 173 of the George the Second's judicial appointments and were only standing in the way of 8. Now, since we know what those 8 stood for, one has to wonder just what kind of people those other 173 are, seeing that Patrick Leahy and Teddy Kennedy found them to be acceptable.

Recently George the Second gave recess appointments to two of them, for which I give him due credit. For a brief shining moment he stood up to the opposition, an act which distinguishes him from George the First. I am left to wonder though; does this mitigate letting Miguel Estrada twist in the wind for two years?

In a recent speech President Bush the Current decried the abuse of power by members of the federal judiciary. A few months ago, an Alabama State Supreme Court Justice stood his ground against just such abuse. What was the Administration's response? In public they ran just as hard and fast from Judge Roy Moore as they could. What is not as well known is this. When elected, Judge Moore had beaten a primary opponent that was a Karl Rove client. One simply does not do this and expect help from this administration. Letting Judge Moore go down in flames in federal court wasn't enough. One of those recess appointments went to Bill Pryor, who was Alabama Attorney General, and who led the charge to abandon Judge Moore to those who would remove him from office.

With regard to the new immigration policy proposal, take the same speech, the same logic, and the same intentions and substitute the words drugs and drug dealers for illegal immigration and illegal immigrants. Suddenly we can take the untold fortunes that are being made in this underground economy and remove them from this "shadow world", dealers would be contributing to our society, entrepreneurs, incomes that can be taxed. New monies would be coming into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Excise taxes collected at the border. The burdens that are currently placed on our healthcare system from the victims of drive-by shootings would exist no more.

After all, are we not spending an excessive amount of the federal largesse on enforcing these untenable and unenforceable laws? Instead of hunting down these unfortunates, driven to this criminal activity by the unfairness built into our economy, we could free up our law enforcement to battle true crime and put real criminals in jail, like folks that fly the confederate battle flag or march in front of abortion clinics or wish to see the Ten Commandments displayed in public. Not for a moment would I advocate that we do this. I do however think that we have to wonder just what set of our laws are we to ignore out of political expediency on any given day.

I wouldn't want the world to think that I am totally unable to find some good in this administration. After all, this president has: cut taxes across the board (though they are not yet permanent), fought to eliminate the marriage penalty, and signed the partial birth abortion ban and offered a lukewarm, halfhearted challenge to providing legal cover to homosexual unions. In addition we have been saved from the Al Gore presidency, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and other threats large and small to humanity.

George the First initially ignored the base as safe. After all, where else were they going to go? In 1992 he had Pat Buchanan around to get his attention, only by then it was too late for him. Given his unenthusiastic support from people with core values, George the First received equally unenthusiastic support from those people in November of that year. What was the result? Two years later a conservative wave washed across the House of Representatives and then the Senate. The rate of growth in government slowed. Though we got Bill Clinton as part of the deal, we even experienced the best of all possible worlds, a total government shut down. Sadly that last part was only temporary.

George the Second does not have the benefit of an opponent to give him a wake up call. Heaven forbid that John Heinz-Kerry should win the White House. If he were to come very close, and that converts this President into an active participating man of conservative principles and actions, then so much the better. If noty. does anybody know the phone number to the Constitution Party headquarters?