HE IS WHO THE RIGHT THINKS HUCKABEE IS:

Bush Derangement Syndrome: A Diagnosis Alan W. Dowd, 2/04/08, FrontPageMagazine.com)

When the Left writes its history of the Bush presidency, there will be no mention that his was the first administration to officially call for the creation of a Palestinian state, long a cause championed by America’s Left. Of course, the tradeoff was that Bush refused to deal with Arafat and his terrorist brethren.

Bush launched genuine wars of liberation that freed women from a medieval monstrosity in Afghanistan and shut down a vast torture chamber in Iraq. In place of the Taliban and the Baathists, Bush propped up a pair of progressive, popular governments in the heart of the Muslim world, bolstering them with the sort of open-ended, nation-building efforts the Left once championed in places like Haiti and Bosnia and Kosovo. He created new aid programs to support pro-freedom elements behind Islam’s iron curtain. And he carried out a long-overdue withdrawal of troops from the theocratic thugocracy in Saudi Arabia.

His policies would be equally dramatic—and one would think, equally appealing to the Left—in the realm of arms control. The Left maintained that nuclear arms reductions would solve the world’s problems. President Bush set America on a path to slash its nuclear arsenal from 7,000 warheads to just over 2,000, and convinced Moscow to do the same. It’s the sort of disarmament program Bush’s predecessors could only imagine but dared not attempt. So why isn’t the Left celebrating Bush’s sweeping reductions?

Likewise, the president’s critics on the Left overlook the development programs he poured into the chronically undeveloped world. “We must include every African, every Asian, every Latin American, every Muslim, in an expanding circle of development,” he explained. And then he increased and revitalized foreign aid with his Millennium Challenge Account program. He conceived and promoted huge new aid programs in Africa, devoting perhaps $45 billion to the global fight against AIDS.

Here at home, Bush supported something close to amnesty for illegal immigrants. The Right punished him for it, and the Left certainly didn’t applaud him personally.

Under his administration, albeit partly as a result of the forces unleashed by 9/11, federal spending grew from $1.9 trillion to about $3 trillion. But government growth was also aide by new entitlements like Medicare Part D, the widely popular and costly prescription benefit Bush endorsed, and new education spending under No Child Left Behind, which Bush promoted. In fact, in his first five years in office, as USA Today reported, Bush increased K-12 education spending by an average of seven percent annually—more than double the increases his predecessor achieved.

So the question remains: Why do liberals despise this big-government, big-spending, humanitarian, nation-building, idealistic, internationalist, arms-cutting president? And why do so many conservatives still defend him?

Ironically, the two sides may have the same reasons for their divergent opinions of this polarizing president.

First and foremost, Bush defeated two of the Left’s standard-bearers in bitterly contested elections.

In 2000, he refused to back down during the Orwellian post-election campaign of Al Gore, author and chief adherent of the global-warming creed. That endeared Bush to the Right and enraged the Left.

Then, Bush played hardball in 2004, overcame incredibly high odds as an unpopular president presiding over an unpopular war, and defeated a leftist archetype in John Kerry.

These were Bush’s original—and unforgiveable—sins.

Speaking of sin, Bush openly talked about how Jesus changed his heart, how his evangelical faith shaped his decisions. Not coincidentally, he encouraged government agencies to make more room for faith-based groups. The Left’s reaction was predictable. A 2003 piece in The Nation condemned Bush’s “heretical manipulation of religious language,” declaring that “Bush’s discourse coincides with that of the false prophets of the Old Testament.” [...]

So what is it about Bush’s faith that provokes such venom? I would submit that much of it has to do with the way his faith informed his position on unborn life.

As a consequence, he would veto a bill that used tax dollars to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos in support of stem-cell research. “Our conscience calls us to pursue the possibilities of science in a manner that respects human dignity and upholds our moral values,” he observed, reminding Congress of a timeless truth: Just because we can do something, just because science makes something possible, doesn’t mean we should do it.

Plus, Bush would appoint judges and justices that seemed open to pulling the plug on Roe. He would reinstate the ban on federal assistance to international abortion providers. His administration would notify states that Medicaid would no longer cover abortion pill RU486—and that states could provide medical coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program to “unborn children.” His administration would promote “embryo adoption.”

As others have observed, Roe is the Left’s Holy of Holies. To undermine it is to commit blasphemy, heresy, and the abomination of desolation.

Finally, the Left’s hatred of Bush has been propelled by his stalwart stance on what one observer shrewdly calls “the wars of 9/11”—the military operations that inevitably followed and will continue to follow the attacks on America’s homeland.

There's a reason why the Third Way, or compassionate conservatism as the President chooses to call it, is such a successful politics. It achieves many of the stated ambitions of the Left via means that appeal to the Right.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 4, 2008 4:23 PM