RattlerGator Blog

More Context on George W. Bush

In the aftermath of President Obama's somewhat disappointing speech last night on the largely successful Fight for Freedom in Iraq, now is another moment for me to reflect on our 43rd president.

It's no secret that I don't take well to criticism of George W. Bush, especially when it is of the know-nothing and historically obtuse variety (these are most often delivered by partisan Democrats). However, it is a particular sore spot with me when Republicans and self-described conservatives are providing the critique -- and I've heard more than my share of those. I, naturally, was pleased yesterday morning to read a post from Matt A. Mayer of the Buckeye Institute over at National Review that does a good job of providing good context on the financial era actually inherited by Dubya (rather than the mythological economic presumptions touted by Democrats) in his post titled The Hole that We're In:

Look, as a conservative who dragged my six-months-pregnant wife from beautiful Colorado to the swamp of Washington, D.C., in 2004 to serve Pres. George W. Bush, no one was more frustrated by the big-government growth that occurred under Republican rule than me. That said, I have grown tired of the near-constant assault on the Bush years, especially when those assaults focus on the economic weakness of those years and conveniently ignore what happened in the few years before President Bush took office.

Here, here!

Mayer goes on to attack, quite properly, the alleged boom years of the Clinton presidency.

[T]he Clinton boom was built upon the mirage of the dot-com and technology craze, as well as the book-cooking of companies like Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. The fact of the mirage is clear when one looks at the S&P 500. Specifically:

On December 9, 1994, the S&P 500 traded at 446.96. From that day until May 24, 2000, it grew by 242%, or an annualized growth rate of 26.15%, to a then record 1,527.46. Even the dotcom and corporate fraud bust failed to totally squeeze the inflated gains out of the market. On January 19, 2001, the day before Bush started his presidency, the S&P 500 traded at 1,342.54, which was still a 200% net gain from December 1994 or a 19.71% annualized growth rate.” Although written in January 2009, when the S&P 500 traded slightly lower than it is today, “[t]he reality is that the current trading price at around 900 is where the S&P 500 would have been had it grown at 5% per year, which is close to the pre-December 1994 annualized growth rate.

The piece goes on to look at the housing bubble and makes the same comparison regarding historical growth compared to the bubble growth that occurred from 1997 to 2006.

Read his entire post; we should never gloss over or forget these factors. For good background on the financial numbers from a layman's perspective, you might want to read a book I wish I had followed years ago -- Get Rich Slowly, by William T. Spitz (at the time of its original publication in the early 1990s, Treasurer at Vanderbilt University; currently, he is a Director & Principal at Diversified Trust Company). From the new media universe, you might also want to review the apparently unrelated Get Rich Slowly blog.

Finally, Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine's Contentions Blog has a post up explaining that a Democrat pollster (Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling) has revealed survey results that indicate “by a 50-42 margin voters [in Ohio] say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama."

My, my.

The bloom certainly is off that particular rose, isn't it? Why come, as the street committee might ask? Rubin gives up three probabilities:

First, Obama’s juvenile buck-passing hasn’t and won’t work. The election game plan of threatening the return of Bush isn’t going to fly. Heck, the voters wouldn’t mind having him back! Second, Obama has, to a degree we have not seen in recent years, shied away from acknowledging error. His “out” was always that Bush had messed things up — far worse than we even imagined. Now with Bush-bashing proven to be entirely counterproductive, what will Obama do to deflect blame? And finally, you have to keep faith with the American people. They may get impatient and lose perspective, but they remain exceedingly fair and possess a large reservoir of common sense (e.g., a mosque at Ground Zero is absurd, Bush was a decent man who made tough calls, we shouldn’t dump on loyal allies). It is good to be reminded of that.

Amen.

There is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in observing the nation awaken from the jaw-dropping unseriousness that sang the praises of Barack Obama for simply looking good and enunciating well. That foolishness has finally evaporated, thank goodness.

Bamboozled

John Hawkins over at Right Wing News has posted a listing of his favorite quotes from Angela McGlowan's new book, Bamboozled. He also did an interview with McGlowan. I haven't personally read the book but the selected quotations seem to be right on the money and I encourage you to review them all or buy the book. An online friend, Ari Kaufman, has read the book and this is his review:

Though it somehow does not have the amount of readers/reviews as many mainstream books, Bamboozled is very well-written, thoroughly-documented and accurate. Therefore, do NOT look for it to be promoted by the state-run media or your local indoctrination university. The left does not like it when a black person, especially an erudite, well-read woman like Angela McGlowan strays from their modern plantation and comes to her own strong conclusions.
 
Sectionally, the book is also divided up nicely. There are tons of rare but important facts, quotes and examples you seldom hear, to describe how, thanks to the media, liberal politicians, blatantly deceitful "educators," omissions from wikipedia and so on, so-called "minorities" like blacks and Latinos remain ignorant of their history. For the past four and a half decades, they tragically vote for a party 100% hostile to them and their faith/values, while hating the party that has given them EVERYTHING from their freedom and safety in the 19th century to integration, civil rights and personal reliance/responsibility in the 20th and beyond.
 
There's a reason Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, the founders of the NAACP and so many more historically essential blacks were staunch Republicans. They valued freedom, morals/faith and self-reliance over victimology, race-baiting and, in their time, segregation and lynchings.
 
It's sad but typical. As a Jewish person, I feel the same about ignorant, selfish, myopic "Jews" still voting for the failure that is the Socialist/Statist Democrat party who, on the whole, is anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and fiscally irresponsible.
 
Like many, when I was young, uneducated and naive, I too was a Democrat. Then I left college, started working, got married, read on my own, stopped going to movies and watching Stewart, Letterman or CNN, and woke up.
 
As usual, the one star reviewers did not read the book. And those who may have perused do not accept an intelligent black female author leaving the "plantation" these racist, modern slaveholding Democrats created, so they instead bashed Angela, Fox News and so on--- ending with "trust the 90% that vote Democrat." McGlowan counters that bogus claim well, so they'll have to read.
 
As McGlowan explains early in chapter five, aside from being ignorant of history (just like liberal whites), blacks fear being ostracized for voting Republican, even though it makes the most sense to do so, rather than voting alongside the secularist haters in Hollywood who run the Democrats, stoke racial fears to get votes, and neither care about "minorities, " nor act as they do, other than for votes every two or four years.
 
That the Democrats have thrived despite their murderous and heinous history, especially toward black people -- from Jackson, Buchanan, Douglas, Johnson, Bedford Forrest, Bull Connor and Preston Brooks to Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Dean, Kennedy, Byrd, Bond, Waters, Pelosi, Reid, Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan, the Clintons, Gore and Obama -- is transparent and truly reprehensible. The GOP should not allow this. Democrat history into today has been unquestionably catastrophic to black success and racial progress. And they benefit from our ignorance.
 
A mind truly is a terrible thing to waste. Time to properly educate --- with real history, no revisionist, multi-culti balderdash that today's teachers foist, which keeps children dumb and downtrodden, but makes them "feel good"  -- the next generation, because the current and prior ones are lost.
 
And lastly, it needs mentioning that "compassion" was in fact often an area of weakness for Pres. Bush. McGlowan notes this because she's fair. But isn't this also one area where the left-wing bigots should give him "credit"? They do not.
 
Instead they call names and give him labels at their conventions; just as they ignore Clinton doing NOTHING for Africa (or Latinos, other than talk but never back anything up, ala John Kerry) while Bush's AIDS initiatives saved nearly five million African lives. Hypocrisy.
 
George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over of "people of color." As Ben Stein once added, "To say otherwise is scandalously untrue." 
 
Wake up, everyone . . . thanks Angela!

I'm going to certainly buy the book and I'm hoping I'll diligently find the time to actually read it. Thanks, Ari, for giving me a very good prompt along with an interesting review.

“Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

Vanderleun! What a talented guy. With the Slipstream Media idea, he's attempting to lay out a path forward, a path many of us are seeking and have been seeking.

This needs to be remembered, I do believe:

Summary:

The Media is how America fights its civil wars. In this war at least half the country is both under-served and is painfully aware it is being under-served and lied to. In pop culture parlance, “We’re going to need bigger guns.”

Seen as the 4th branch of government, the unelected and self-selected Mainstream Media, in cultural and political collusion with the present government, knows this and – even as it dies – will do everything it can to prevent the arming of the people with more and better media.

To control the medium is to control the message. And control of the message means control of the hearts, minds, and votes of the people. To bring a better, clearer, and brighter message to the American people, we must have media that, like the Internet itself, “sees censorship as system damage and routes around it.” To accomplish this we must, in a network of small pieces loosely joined together, work to create a pervasive new media across America. Many of these pieces are already in place. Many more need to be created. All need to be joined in an affiliation. Mainstream media already knows how to do this and we must, to paraphrase Abby Hoffman, "Steal Their Book." Media not busy being born is busy dying.

This is the first in a series of articles on how to go about building a new American media; a media composed of newspapers, television, radio, film, music, publishing, and the multi-media capabilities of the Internet; an American media open to all and founded on the five bedrock principles of “Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

When dinosaurs die large opportunities for growth bloom within the ecosystem. The death of the old media is such an opportunity. It affords a wide range of possibilities to create a new media, a media that runs to the side of the mainstream media, but ultimately supplants it by slipping by it. For now I call it, The Slipstream Media.

By “The Slipstream Media” I mean the use of all forms of media currently in use to inform and persuade the public that "There is another system."

This series of articles will be composed of theoretical and practical observations on the content, forms, principles, funding, and business structures involved in creating a new media network in the rapidly changing marketplace of today and the foreseeable future. It will focus on, in Lenin’s phrase, “What is to be done,” as well as what can be done, and how the creation of the Slipstream Media might be accomplished.

What is to be done.

The Premise: Better ideas require not only better arguments, but also better means of distribution.

To survive and thrive, better ideas also require funding, a sound business model based on the realities of the present, and a path to positive cash flow.

Now, what about that -- huh? Go read the rest, and keep his website near to your thoughts. The man is on to something.

Quick Note on the John McWhorter Interview including His Thoughts on Barack Obama

First, I thought it was great.

My wife watched it for a brief moment and that just happened to be when one of "the inevitable questions" was raised. I was not surprised to hear he has a white wife (I have two brothers who have gone that route). This wouldn't be the world we live in, I guess, if that question didn't get raised. I also was not surprised to hear that he's a Democrat and has never voted Republican. But I'd bet my bottom dollar many were surprised and to this minute I'd also wager that many black folks who watched the show don't believe him for a single, solitary second. He's a self-hatin' Uncle Tom Republican and that's all there is to it!

This wouldn't be the world we live in if that intransigent belief also wasn't the reality of the matter, either.

I must admit that I was surprised to hear him rationalize Michelle Obama's "first time in my adult life I'm proud of America" comment. Sorry, but I can't give her or any other person who defends it a pass. No way, no how. It was a dumbass thing to say because it's a dumbass thing to believe. It opens a window into just how incredibly narrow far too many African Americans view current affairs in our country.

I was equally surprised (and disappointed) to hear him emphatically say how much he hoped Barack Obama is elected President. On that point, he seemed to be caught in a surprisingly narrow viewpoint that I would not have presumed. It is a viewpoint that hasn't (apparently) contemplated what happens if a cherry-picked proxy of the white elite gets in office and . . . bombs. Does he suddenly become "not black enough"? Or what happens if and when his wife does or says something stupid (and Michelle seems more than ready to do both) and subsequently gets eaten alive in the press for her gaffe(s)? Or what happens when, as is the present case with President Bush, people who should know better insist in the most vile way possible that you're stupid and a monkey and sleeping with some woman cabinet office of another race. . . you get the picture, I'm sure.

To me, John McWhorter didn't give the impression that he has looked at the other side of the President Obama coin. And that's a serious problem. Black America is already incredibly juvenile with the way in which we approach national politics (we're not only guilty of Navel-gazing 101 but we fiercely insist on having our cake and eating it too when it comes to complaining about black versus white officeholders). Are we going to know how to deal with caricature's of this man if he becomes President?

I doubt it.

I recognize it may be a good problem to have and subsequently attempt to overcome. Trust me, I recognize that. But I hear people talking in the most pollyannish kind of way when considering the prospect of President Obama and watching McWhorter today confirmed my bias on the potential problem. I would be much more comfortable if a Jim Clyburn were in this position. Seasoned. And definitely a man of the people. Say whatever you want, Barack Obama is not a man of the people. But they generally aren't, whether Democrat or Republican, and this is another reason I would have been much more excited by (for example) a Clyburn making his way through the primaries.

Enough about Barack Obama, though.

Another McWhorter surprise: he actually accepted the scare figures given by a caller (and referencing some recently released Pew Charitable Trust study) concerning how many black men are imprisoned in America. He seemed to accept an assertion that this somehow accounts for the large number of single black females in our nation. Of course, the caller (I'm sure) was trying to jam him on marrying a white babe. For good reason, he definitely didn't go down that road. I did find myself wondering, though, what influence was his white Jewish wife having on him politically? And by that I mean to say, what effect is her outlook having on him with respect to domestic American politics? My suspicion is that she would be more stereotypically leftwing than he. However, who the hell knows?

Regarding the taped In Depth interviews at his home in Jersey City shown at the top of the 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. hours: the interlude with the piano playing? A bit too long, a bit too much. I wanted to hear more about Philadelphia and Mt. Airy, his days at Rutgers as an undergraduate, etc.

During the live call-in McWhorter seemed to take great pains to backtrack from a disparaging piece he wrote on hip-hop and it had the flavor of a man who wanted "his" black folks to not dislike him so much. This is something I'm particularly attentive to. The whole "racial team" thing is so strong in the black community that most of us find it absolutely impossible to think beyond it. McWhorter's problem is even more acute given that this mother and father were involved in academia and his mother's field was Social Work. Most social workers I've met, black, white or otherwise, find it virtually impossible to think beyond government action (which is why I thought Dubya's emphasis on compassionate conservativism was so important -- it was a pathway toward private sector change-agents).

Politically, I found myself wishing at the conclusion of the interview that I could sit down and talk with him further. Query him about some rather obvious presumptions he has about Republicans. Maybe challenge him on the whole 1966 thing (I thought that was a great point he made, setting that as the year when so much began fundamentally changing in Black America for the worse; it was also when the self-imposed mass political movement by black folks from Republican to Democrat was set in stone; I can't help but wonder if he has ever seriously pondered that connection?).

All in all, very interesting and far less negative than the Dinesh D'Souza interview. Which is curious, in and of itself, or so it appears to me. Next month on In Depth? That damn Michael Eric Dyson. Lord have mercy, Jesus!

John McWhorter on BookTV This Sunday

Here's the blurb sent out by C-Span:

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A monthly LIVE author interview, featuring your calls
Sunday 12 PM-3 PM ET, re-airs Sunday at midnight ET

Author and linguist John McWhorter will be our guest this month on In Depth. Mr. McWhorter is currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and has taught at University of California - Berkeley and Cornell University. His books include: Authentically Black; Losing the Race: Self- Sabotage in Black America; Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America; The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language; Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care; Defining Creole; and Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars. You can participate in the discussion by calling in during the program: Republicans 202-737-0001, Democrats 202-737-0002, Independents 202-628- 0205 or by e-mailing your questions to [email protected].

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This, ladies and gentlemen, promises to be a very interesting show. C-Span2 does a great job with these three-hour interviews. The last one I remember watching, however, involved another conservative bad boy who has been convicted via Star Chamber proceedings of violating the mandates of the "colored team." That, of course, was Dinesh D'Souza and there seemed to be an inordinate amount of negative callers allowed through.

I expect the same result this Sunday. Naturally, the show will be repeated; the listed March repeats as of this writing are Monday March 3rd at Midnight [that's this Sunday night in the minds of most], Saturday March 8th at 9 a.m., and Monday March 10th at 3 a.m.

BookTV This Weekend

Although I'm about to get out and try and deal with MARTA to hopefully get from down here around the Airport up to the Georgia Dome hassle-free, if I was sedentary and at home I'd be very tempted to check out BookTV this weekend. Their alert this week advises, in part, the following:

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On Saturday, September 29, from 10 AM to 5:30 PM ET, Book TV will provide live, all-day coverage of the National Book Festival from the National Mall in Washington, DC. We will have event coverage interspersed with interviews and calls with featured authors, including:

• Jan Crawford Greenburg, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States
• Douglas Wilson, Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words
• Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989
• Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward , The War: An Intimate History 1941-1945

LIVE coverage will reair Saturday starting at 8 PM ET.


On Sunday, Book TV will air selected coverage from the festival throughout the day:

• Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
  (Sunday 3:30 AM and 4 PM ET)
• Korean War Veterans discuss David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Sunday 12 PM ET)
• World War II Veterans discuss The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 (Sunday 1:30 PM ET)
• Meryle Secrest, Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Sunday 3 PM ET)
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Sunday, 3:30 PM ET)
• Douglas Wilson, Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words
  (Sunday 4:30 PM ET)
• James Swanson, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
  (Sunday 5 PM ET)
• Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 (Sunday 5:30 PM ET)

The National Book Festival is organized by the Library of Congress and hosted by First Lady Laura Bush.

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That's one hell of a lineup. And, also referenced in the alert, is a very interesting discussion I hope to catch later:

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Insightful author interviews
Saturday 9 PM, Sunday 6 PM and 9 PM, Monday 12 AM and 3 AM ET

In World War IV, Norman Podhoretz argues that the "war against Islamofascism" currently being waged by the Bush administration is as important for our country to engage in as World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He defends the Bush administration's dual policies of preemption and democratization, and says that past presidents of both parties have failed to recognize the importance of going on the offensive in the battle against Islamic extremism. Mr. Podhoretz discusses his book with Charles Peña, senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

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Great viewing, great reading.

MRS. INSTAPUNDIT SCORES!

 

In a column posted today on TCS Daily, Dr. Helen Smith (wife of Glenn Reynolds, the one and only Instapundit) sang the praises of Shelby Steele for his new book, White Guilt : How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Dr. Smith wrote: