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Monday, October 03, 2005

National Review Gives up on Bush

Referring to the Meirs nomination as an "unforced error," David Frum, heretofore one of the Bush administration's strongest supporters in the press, writes on National Review Online that George W. Bush's legacy as president will largely be one of missed opportunities, of failure:

Again and again, George Bush has announced bold visionary policies--and again and again he has entrusted the execution of those policies to people who do not believe in them or even understand them. This is most conspicuously true in foreign policy, but it has been true in domestic policy as well. The result: the voice is the voice of Reagan, but too often the hands are the hands of George HW Bush.

Or worse. George H. W. Bush made his bad appointments in the name of replacing Reaganite "ideology" with moderate Republican "competence." He didn't live up to his own billing, but you can understand his intentions. But the younger Bush has based his personnel decisions upon a network of personal connections in which competence does not always play the largest part.

The idea that conservatives now see Bush the Younger as even worse than Bush the Elder is quite stunning.

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