Conservative columnist asks Republicans to stop trying to rehabilitate GWB

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Published: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 1:25 AM

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

I don't know about you, but I'm opposed to that immigration program the president announced. It's nothing but amnesty masquerading as reform.

"This program will offer legal status as temporary workers to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States," the president said.

The president in question is George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. The quote is from his 2004 speech announcing his support for a relaxation of immigration laws far more sweeping than the plan Obama announced Tuesday.

I bring this up to puncture the pretensions of all of those wannabe right-wingers of talk radio and the blogosphere who keep trying to rescue Bush's reputation. They spent most of the past week trying to give Bush credit for bumping off Osama bin Laden. They forgot to mention that in 2001, Bush let bin Laden escape from Afghanistan and then compounded that mistake by getting U.S. troops bogged down in wars — just as bin Laden had desired.

As a small-government, outside-the-Beltway conservative, I never liked Bush. On key policy issues, I can't find a dime's worth of difference between him and Obama — or should I make that a trillion-dollar budget deficit's worth of difference? They're both big-spending, big-government types.

The other day, for example, I wrote about the Obama administration's proposal to put GPS devices in every American's car. Here's a typical comment I found online concerning that plan: "Of course, a communist would love to control mobility."

True, but the commie in question is Bush. His administration originated that idea. Obamacare? In my view, that's socialized medicine. But it's slightly less socialized than Bush's expansion of Medicare. Iraq? Libya? Go down a checklist of issues and you'll see the same phenomenon at work:

Obama gets called a commie for continuing in the Bush tradition.

Objections to Obama are based not on politics, but on personality. Here, we come to one of the clichés often heard about Bush during his tenure: He was the kind of guy you could have a beer with.

No, he wasn't. For one thing, he doesn't drink. But even if he did drink, the last time you went to a baseball game, did you get to sit in the owner's box? Bush was never the type of guy who sat in the bleachers with a beer. He was the type of guy who owned the team.

As it happens, in my line of work, I often down a beer or two in the presence of a politician. And I prefer drinking with Democrats. Here's why: I know they want to take my money. They know they want to take my money. So there's nothing to argue about.

After a few cold ones, I imagine Obama would put his immigration policy in plain English: "Look, we'll get 8 million new voters. Six million will vote Democratic. Do the math."

As for Bush, his explanation for his amnesty would likely revolve around the need of his fellow rich folks for cheap labor. But he would, I suspect, couch it in high-minded rhetoric about "liberty and civic responsibility, equality under God, tolerance for others," as he did in that 2004 speech. At that point, I'd probably break out laughing and spill my beer.

If I may descend into psychobabble, I think the great mass of Republicans are in a state of denial regarding Bush. A spoiled New England preppy fooled them into thinking he was some sort of a small-town hayseed from Texas. Bush came out of the same old-money WASP culture as New Jersey's own Christie Whitman — and he left the same devastation in his wake for the Republicans who trusted him. Few Republicans defend Whitman's legacy, but at least she was what she pretended to be — wealthy and out of touch with reality.

As for Obama, he really does come out of the vast middle class of America. Perhaps because of its lack of an ethnic majority, Hawaii is mercifully free of the bogus elites that plague the rest of the nation. He then moved on to hone his skills working in the Chicago political machine.

Those skills are impressive, and the Republican Party had better come up with some means of countering them — other than rehabilitating the reputation of the worst president in recent history.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2011/05/excuse_me_if_i_dont_join_the_h.html