VDH Rocks!

FrontPage magazine.com :: Symposium: The Left's Attack on Bush by Jamie Glazov: "Hanson: The fury is deductive-a much exaggerated version of the conservative dislike of Clinton even when he pushed welfare reform, balanced budgets, and the bombing of Milosevic. After all, Bush increased domestic spending-education, health, housing-by over 7% per annum; add record aid for AIDs, prescription drug entitlements, near amnesty for illegal immigration, minority appointments-and there is little reason to see him as particularly reactionary or even traditionally conservative. The poor benefit from low interest rates, historical rates of GNP growth, tax cuts, spectular productivity growth, low inflation, and sudden job creation this month.
No, the problem derives from pre-existing and often trivial animus: (1) anger over the 2000 election and the eroding political resonance of traditional liberalism, (2) Bush's purported anti-intellectualism, Christianity, southern accent, and unconcern with aristocratic leftism from the NPR to the New York Times to Malibu parties. Shrug off all that and it threatens the pretensions of the intellectual elite; (3) and his moral clarity that shook up the world nursed on fuzzy, triangulating Clintonism-whether in the case of corrupt Middle East regimes, 'moderates' like Yasser Arafat, the utopian pretentious and profiteering Europeans, South Koreans, NATO, and what now seems to be an increasingly corrupt United Nations. Whatever one thinks of Bush, everything is now on the table for reappraisal and a wide variety of vested interests depend on caricaturing him rather than adjusting to change and adjudicating issues and ideas on their merits."