raisinbran20 asked
Policy fatigue may hit the Bush administration soon. The Abu Ghraib (search) prison scandal — as well as the gruesome murder of American civilian Nick Berg (search) — is yet more bad news from Iraq. As Shakespeare says, woes come not as single spies but in battalions. Come November, the American people may catch policy fatigue — feeling they need a respite from all the churning out of Washington. Naturally, Sen. John Kerry would benefit from that. After all, he’s the real conservative nowadays. President George W. Bush is the real progressive. Not, of course, in terms of ideology. Here, Bush is true blue conservative, and Kerry is a real progressive. It’s in a leadership sense that Kerry is conservative, with a stand-pat foreign policy, whereas Bush is progressive — even radical — in his global approach. Soon after taking office, Bush showed he was a real progressive by freeing America from the straightjacket of outdated, or just bad, treaties. Take, for instance, the ABM Treaty (search). For 20 years, Presidents Reagan, Bush the First and Clinton danced around this real barrier to protecting America. Then along comes Bush, the progressive, who kicks this barrier aside, and thus opens up possibilities of innovative technology to safeguard our homeland. Likewise with the Kyoto Treaty (search), which languished in the Senate for years. President Clinton never pushed for its ratification, since 95 senators voted that it had fundamental flaws. Bush courageously stopped this shenanigan, and frankly told everyone that the Kyoto Treaty was passé. The second big indication of Bush’s progressivism was the pre-emption doctrine (search). Adopting it broke with past U.S. strategic doctrines of containment and deterrence, recognizing that Al Qaeda fanatics can neither be contained, nor deterred. An offshoot of pre-emption gave the grounds for liberating Iraq. Granted, it’s been a big surprise that weapons of mass destruction haven’t been found there. B
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