Wow…

It is Groundhog Day—ten seconds on Iraq and suddenly it sounds like we've started over with the Bush circa campaign 2000.

Comments

[matthew hogan]

Except the "humble foreign policy" part seems to have been inadvertently left out....

[Michael]

I watched it in Japan on cspan.com...after that scary inaugural speech I'm starting to like the old boy. He's like a crazy uncle, muttering the word "freedom" without ever defining it, and pushing for smaller government in the same breath as his intiatives for government expansion. All I can do is laugh and say, "Oh George...".
Just ONCE I'd like to hear his definitions of liberty and freedom. His debasement of those words is an insult to real freedom-loving people everywhere.
Ugh...I gotta run since I'm starting to get angry.

[Brian]

Iraq served its purpose and got him reelected. Now it's declare victory and get out so we can focus on domestic stuff, like seeing how much loot he can direct to his donors and buddies.

[Ken Shultz]

A predictable plot isn't always a bad thing, but the acting in this production stank.

[raymond]

Yesterday there was a fascinating article in the local paper about the "talibanisation" of Bassorah (I think it was Bassorah, anyway. I can't find the article on the Net).

According to the reporter, the goal of the leader of Bassorah is to "inscribe the city in the sharia firmament" or something to that effect. Women are obliged to cover up, they may not work with men, mixed classes are forbidden... The whole bit. The Brits don't get involved.

So maybe it _is_ Groundhog Day. But with Afghanistan as the recurring nightmare.

[TM Lutas]

For the vast majority of people who care about actual results and aren't squeemish about Bismark's policy "sausage factory" there's an awful lot more hope about this President. Any practical president is going to have a mix of liberty enhancing and liberty detracting policy initiatives (go ahead and find me one that doesn't). Progress is measured by the liberty enhancing ones outweighing the liberty detracting ones. In the end, Bush does well by that yardstick.

He has moved the entire government policy debate so that there is now an expectation that you should measure progress and government programs that do not do their job well should be fixed or eliminated. That's a tremendous improvement on the preceding no accountability standard. All that libertarians have to do now is to prove what our ideology has always held, that most government programs don't do a very good job. If the previous regime was trying to hit a Roger Clemens fast ball the new one is T-Ball for libertarians.

Alas, too many libertarians are unwilling to engage in serious, practical work. All too many of them seem to congregate here.

[Ken Shultz]

"Progress is measured by the liberty enhancing ones outweighing the liberty detracting ones. In the end, Bush does well by that yardstick."

You don't mean domestically, do you? Because if you do...well...I think that position's untenable.

"Alas, too many libertarians are unwilling to engage in serious, practical work. All too many of them seem to congregate here."

I might agree with you on the former, but the latter seems to assume that the kind of libertarians who are unwilling to engage in serious, practical work could be in short supply--here or anywhere else.

...One might assume that the people who think that the government should do very little might be inclined to...but never mind. I'll just leave that aside and let you crawl back under your bridge and get back to your serious, practical work.