The Political Chase

If Bill Clinton did it, it had to be wrong

Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed Uniter, has turned his focus to Middle Eastern diplomacy and is moving full speed ahead in an effort to do something, anything that may change his legacy from being totally void of any achievement (Taking more vacation than any other president does not count.) I hope I am proven wrong, but due to his obsessive, compulsive, recalcitrant nature, Mr. Bush has already postured himself for yet another failure.

From the first day George Bush became the 43rd President of the United States, he has carried out flawlessly a policy that has a greater priority than any other throughout his presidency. Iraq, terrorizing the nation with perpetual fear-mongering, declaring all Democrats terrorists, outing CIA agents. Whatever it may be, none of them exceed Executive Order No. 1 - If Bill Clinton did it, it had to be wrong. Executive Order No. 2 - Whatever Bill Clinton did, do the opposite.

So, Mr. Bush trots off as the Masterhood Middle East Peace Mediator. Excalibur in hand, adorned in Clinton-legacy-repellant armor,and a take-advice-from-no-one shield. Indeed, the only man in the world capable of laying to rest 1,300-year-old Middle Eastern conflicts. That is of course with the provision that his anti-Clinton armor retains its effectiveness.

With eyes shifting from side to side, the Mediator skillfully offers a nudge.

It might seem, after nearly seven years of deliberate detachment from Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, that President Bush has plunged into Middle Eastern diplomacy with Clintonesque energy.

He met with the Israel and Palestinian leaders at the White House on Monday and will do so again on Wednesday. On Tuesday, he will meet them at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., along with delegations from 46 countries and international organizations (including, after an arm-twisting by phone last week, Saudi Arabia).

In fact, Mr. Bush and his aides still deplore what they view as President Clinton’s disastrously hands-on involvement in the peace process in 2000. And they insist that Mr. Bush does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision, just as they insist that this is not an 11th-hour effort to forge a legacy other than the one left by the Iraq war.

It is not necessary to document George Bush’s patent failure in foreign policy. Instead, I’ll just handle it this way. Tell me something he has achieved that did not result in catastrophic consequences, and we’ll go from there.

In almost seven years as President, Mr. Bush has been to the Middle East only four times. Two trips were to Iraq, and both of those were photo-op’s. The first trip he served turkey to a few of the troops. On another trip in September 2007, he staged a peaceful photo-op within the safety of a U.S. base many miles away from Baghdad, presenting the facade of how safe Iraq was.

Sep. 3, 2007 - President Bush makes brief stop in Iraq on way to Australia

I suppose the president is far better off by simply adhering to the orders advice of Mr. Cheney, who has obviously demonstrated considerably more successes than Bill Clinton ever imagined.

Money statement of the day?

“The United States cannot impose our vision,” Mr. Bush told the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the Oval Office on Monday, before saying, and sounding, again, Clintonesque, “but we can help facilitate.”