By Wlady Pleszczynski on 3.8.05 @ 12:09AM
Last week proved again what makes George W. Bush an extraordinary political player.
We've heard ad nauseam that George W. Bush has been
misunderestimated, that he's a lot smarter than his numbskull
critics. But smarts is only the half of it. Last week he again
demonstrated that his talents above all lie in his political
presence -- and lack of serious opposition.
The occasion was the World Series champion Boston Red Sox'
official visit at the White House, an ostensibly perfect bipartisan
gathering, which included Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and others
from New England's congressional delegation. Bush's remarks to the
assembled crowd oozed with baseball charm, knowledge, and wit. He
seems at home with baseball as he would be in Crawford. I
especially liked his salute to Jimmy Piersall, who was in the
audience, one of those representing, in Bush's words, "a lot of
great Boston Red Sox players that a lot of us grew up watching
play..." The brilliant, tormented Piersall, of course, represented
a lot more than that. Everyone who knew their baseball would have
known. It was a special moment.
Kerry arrived while Bush was speaking. Ever the genial host, the
president ad-libbed this boffo greeting:
"Senator, welcome. Good to see you. Only time I -- I like to see
Senator Kerry, except when we're fixin' to debate. If you know what
I mean."
Sure did. That pretty much summed up Bush: Friendly, folksy,
lightly self-deprecating -- and on top. Eat your heart out,
Senator.
Bush, better than anyone, knows that the world loves a winner.
Lately that's allowed him to increase his lead over Democrats and
other carpers substantially. A new favorite national pastime is to
watch Bush's critics fumbling for a way not to give him credit for
recent stunning developments in the Middle East.
Few have the class of ancient socialist Daniel Schorr to
admit straightforwardly, as Schorr did in the
Christian Science Monitor, that Bush "may have had it
right" when he said, before the invasion of Iraq, that "a liberated
Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital
region."
By contrast, a grudging Democrat partisan like former
Washington Post reporter and current Post
columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. can't even bring himself to concede that
Bush spoke of freedom's spread as a war aim. Instead, last Friday,
he endorsed the canard that "Bush's original reason
for going to war -- weapons of mass destruction fell apart," giving
way to "new claims that the war was really about spreading
democracy" -- which "have the feel of an after-the-fact
rationale."
After the fact? Anyone with an ounce of journalistic integrity
knows very well that Bush announced democracy and freedom as a
major war aim in a national televised address before the American
Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003, some three weeks before
U.S. forces moved into Iraq.
Perhaps Dionne could blame his ignorance on his employers, which
unlike the New York Times, say, failed to report on Bush's
speech to the AEI, though it must have become widely known given
that the Post in coming months would make knowing
references to it.
Perhaps Dionne can hide behind his noting that
democracy-building just has "the feel" of an ex-post-facto
rationale, even if it's not. That's one problem Democrats have in
dealing with the world, in which "feelings" apparently trump clear
thinking every time. Isn't that the road to delusion? It appears to
have become well-traveled.
Dionne saves his best for last, noting that the Democrats will
grudgingly back off Iraq-related Bush-bashing "as long as events
justify it." Once the going gets tough, in other words, don't count
on us. And they wonder why Bush is league MVP and Cy Young Award
winner while they're stuck in the bleachers.
topics:
Iraq, NATO
