Conservatives feel betrayed by Bush

[saltydawg]

Conservatives feel betrayed by Bush
Analysis: Conservative base, feeling betrayed by selection of Miers, lashed out at Bush
- Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief
Friday, October 28, 2005

Washington -- Harriett Miers' 25-day odyssey as a Supreme Court nominee exposed a serious rift between President Bush and his conservative base, posing a surprising challenge as he tries to emerge from his presidency's darkest days.

In choosing Miers, a nominee with no judicial track record but a long history of personal loyalty, Bush essentially told conservatives: "Trust me.''

They didn't.

At a time when Bush's popularity has sunk to its lowest level, he must find a way to mollify his conservative, and traditionally most reliable, supporters at the same time he reaches out to moderates as he pursues the war in Iraq, Social Security reform, tax simplification and other priorities of his second term.

In Democratic enclaves such as Northern California, many liberals find Bush's policies so deplorable that they assume their ideological counterparts on the right adore him. The Miers saga revealed a more complicated and tenuous relationship.

Critics who have blamed Bush for ignoring the political center since his contested victory in 2000 got a crash course in what happens to a Republican president who does not please the right on a matter as important as the Supreme Court.

Conservatives expressed more disdain for Bush's agenda and more contempt for his leadership in the past month than they had in the first 56 months of his presidency combined. They questioned his integrity and intellectual capacity and jeered his handlers for the way they disparaged their complaints, much as Democrats have done for the past four years.

Many suspect Miers' abrupt departure on the eve of possible indictments against top administration officials in the CIA leak probe was a timely effort by the White House to make amends with its base. Some on the left decried it as capitulation.

Yet even if Bush delivers his base an unabashed conservative ideologue to replace Miers, many of the harsh words uttered since he nominated her on Oct. 3 will be hard to take back.

"(Bush) has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution,'' conservative columnist George Will wrote on Oct. 5. "The president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution.''

On the day Miers was nominated, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wrote: "It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. ... What are the prospects for a strong Bush second term? What are the prospects for holding solid GOP majorities in Congress in 2006 if conservatives are demoralized?''

And just last week, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union wrote: "We've swallowed policies we might otherwise have objected to because we've believed that he and those around him are themselves conservatives trying to do the right thing against sometimes terrible odds. We've been there for him because we've considered ourselves part of his team. No more.''

Conservative contempt for Bush, though far from universal, extends to matters far beyond the Miers' nomination. Many on the right are deeply upset by the huge expansion of government spending and rise in the national debt. Others are opposed to the entanglement in Iraq, the Patriot Act, the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs and Bush's signing into law of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance measure.

"The fact is, from the beginning there have been a number of things that conservatives have been either leery of, or upset with, the way the Bush administration has proceeded,'' Keene said Thursday.

"It was the promise to move the Supreme Court decidedly to the right that motivated many conservatives to vote in record numbers in the 2004 election," he said.

"The Bush folks told conservatives explicitly, maybe you don't like the spending, maybe you disagree with our foreign policy or the war in Iraq, or the Patriot Act, but this is about the Supreme Court. This is what George Bush said he was going to do, to get someone in the mold of (justices Antonin) Scalia and (Clarence) Thomas.''

When Bush nominated Miers, Keene said conservatives felt betrayed just as they had a generation earlier, when Bush's father agreed to raise taxes after declaring during the campaign: "Read my lips, no new taxes.''

"You never completely repair it,'' Keene said. "They've got a lot of fence-mending to do.''

Bush now confronts an opening on the court with the same seemingly impossible task he faced when the summer began: fulfilling his pledge to conservatives to move the court to the right while fulfilling his promise to be a uniter, not a divider.

Senate Democrats, none of whom had said they had planned to vote for Miers, decried her withdrawal Thursday as a capitulation to the right.

"Not a single Republican senator called for Harriet Miers' withdrawal,'' said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "It was the very extreme wing of the president's party ... that brought about the withdrawal. If the president continues to listen to that extreme wing on judicial nominations or everything else, it can only spell trouble for his presidency and for America.''

It is not Democrats, who long ago abandoned Bush, whom the president needs to worry about. Bush's drop in popularity over the past several months -- about four in 10 Americans say they approve of the job he is doing as president -- is largely due to mounting frustration among Republicans and independents.

His agenda is in trouble if he cannot find votes among centrist Democrats and independents. His agenda is dead if he cannot find enthusiasm among his conservative base.

[aubunique]

Guest Commentary : The anti-life movement
BY CHRISTIAN BEENFELDT Ayn Rand Institute
Posted on Friday, June 16, 2006

The recent ban on abortion in South Dakota is a victory for the "pro-life" movement — and thus, anti-abortionists claim, a victory for "the sanctity of human life." But is it? The South Dakota law bans abortions in all cases except saving the life of the mother. Consider what this would mean for human life — not the "lives" of embryos or primitive fetuses, but the lives of real, living, breathing, thinking women. It would mean that women who wanted to terminate a pregnancy because it resulted from rape or contraceptive failure — or because the would-be father has abandoned her — or because the fetus is malformed — would be forbidden from doing so. It would mean that they would be forced to endure the misery of unwanted pregnancy and the incredible burdens of child rearing. It would mean that women would be sentenced to 18-year terms of enslavement to unwanted children — thereby suffocating their hopes, their dreams, their personal ambitions, their chance of happiness. And it would mean that women who refused to submit to such a fate would be forced to turn to the "back-alley" at a staggering risk to their health. According to a World Health Organization estimate, 110,000 women worldwide die each year from such illegal abortions and up to six times as many suffer injury from them. Clearly, anti-abortionists believe that such women’s lives are an unimportant consideration in the issue of abortion. Why? Because, they claim, the embryo or fetus is a human being — and thus to abort it is murder. But an embryo is not a human being, and abortion is not murder. There is no scientific reason to characterize a raisinsize lump of cells as a human being. Biologically speaking, such an embryo is far more primitive than a fish or a bird. Anatomically, its brain has yet to develop, so in terms of its capacity for consciousness, it doesn’t bear the remotest similarity to a human being. This growth of cells has the potential to become a human being — if preserved, fed, nurtured, and brought to term by the woman that it depends on — but it is not actually a human being. Analogously, seeds can become mature plants — but that hardly makes a pile of acorns equal to a forest.
What can justify the sacrifice of an actual woman’s life to human potential of the most primitive kind? There can be no rational justification for such a position — certainly not a genuine concern for human life. The ultimate "justification" of the "pro-life" position is religious dogma. Led by the American Roman Catholic Church and Protestant fundamentalists, the movement’s basic tenet, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is that an embryo must be treated "from conception as a person" created by the "action of God." What about the fact that an embryo is manifestly not a person, and treating it as such inflicts mass suffering on real people? This tenet is not subject to rational scrutiny; it is a dogma that must be accepted on faith.
The "pro-life" movement tries to obscure the religious, inhuman nature of its position by endlessly focusing on the medical details of late-term abortions (although it seldom mentions that "partial birth" abortions are extremely rare, constituting 0.17 percent of all abortions, and often involve a malformed fetus or a threat to the life of the mother). But one must not allow the smokescreen to distract one from the real issue: the "pro-life" movement is on a faith-based crusade to ban abortion no matter the consequences to actual human life — part of what the Pro-Life Alliance calls the "absolute moral duty to do everything possible to stop abortion, even if in the first instance we are only able to chip away at the existing legislation." This is why it supports the South Dakota law, which is the closest the movement has come to achieving its avowed goal: to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy, including the first trimester — when 90 percent of abortions take place. As the Pro-Life Alliance puts it: "We continue to campaign for total abolition."
The "pro-life" movement is not a defender of human life — it is, in fact, a profound enemy of actual human life and happiness. Its goal is to turn women into breeding mares whose body is owned by the state and whose rights, health and pursuit of happiness are sacrificed en mass — all in the name of dogmatic sacrifice to the pre-human.
Christian Beenfeldt, MA in philosophy, is a guest writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.

[Bigdog13]

Aub,

That article is a big bag of nothing. We are all dumber for having read it. It is long on opinion and short on fact.

[Rooster]

"His agenda is in trouble if he cannot find votes among centrist Democrats and independents. His agenda is dead if he cannot find enthusiasm among his conservative base."

The above quote is b/c right now he has no one lighting a fire b/c for the most part nothing is going on. Besides the war in Iraq, it is slow.


I don't feel abandoned. The 2 tissues that he was pissing me off on were immigration and spending. He is doing better w/ one of them.

[Dirtydawg]

Guest Commentary : The anti-life movement
BY CHRISTIAN BEENFELDT Ayn Rand Institute
Posted on Friday, June 16, 2006

...There is no scientific reason to characterize a raisinsize lump of cells as a human being...

Christian Beenfeldt, MA in philosophy, is a guest writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.

When, then, does the characterization begin? If you want to get down to the basics, even an adult "human" is nothing more than a lump of cells. If we have the right to kill a human embryo because it is simply a "raisinsize lump of cells", then why can't we kill human infants, teens and adults that suffer from maladies that render them less than human without having to worry about legal consequences? I mean, at least a human embryo, according to this article has the chance to become a "real human" with it's mother's care and nurturing. A real human with some mental and physical debilitating malformation can't even claim that. Where is the line drawn?

[TechDawgMc]

Christian Beenfeldt seems to take after Ayn Rand in reasoning ability.

(That, incidently, is not a compliment)

[duckbillplatty]

I think anyone but Marc Sandalow should be writing about what conservatives think. He's written about a dozen articles like this.. articles about how the average midwestern man had fallen out of grace with Bush before the 2004 election, etc, etc, etc.

The fact is that some people got hot-headed after the first attempt at a judicial nomination. Does this mean that Pat Robertson will endorse Hillary Clinton? Hell no.