{"id":589,"date":"2012-09-26T21:23:56","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T01:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=589"},"modified":"2012-09-26T21:23:56","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T01:23:56","slug":"exorcising-neoconservative-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/09\/exorcising-neoconservative-ghosts.html","title":{"rendered":"Exorcising Neoconservative Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, while on Meet the Press, <\/em>Peggy Noonan offered some advice to Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.<\/p>\n

Romney, she said, \u201chas to kick away from and define himself against what happened for the eight years of George W. Bush\u2019s presidency [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t agree more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Noonan rightly observes, not only did Bush\u2019s tenure culminate in \u201ceconomic collapse;\u201d it presided over \u201ctwo long, frustrating wars that people think were not won.\u201d<\/p>\n

Romney, Noonan insists, must resist his opponents\u2019 efforts to depict him as determined to \u201cbring that stuff back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

To hear the Republican pundits of talk radio and Fox News tell it, one could be pardoned for thinking either of one of two things.\u00a0 One sufficiently reasonable inference we can draw is that the Bush presidency was not an unqualified betrayal of everything that these very same \u201cconservative\u201d pundits claim to affirm.\u00a0 The other\u2014the only other\u2014proposition left for us to conclude is that the eight years of Bush never occurred. \u00a0<\/p>\n

But the hard, ugly fact of the matter is that the Bush presidency most certainly did occur. And for as memory-impaired as Americans tend to be, they remember it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This, though, isn\u2019t as surprising as it may sound.\u00a0 In fact, with Bush supporters like Bill Bennett\u2014one of Noonan\u2019s interlocutors on Sunday\u2014rehashing the same talking points that figured so prominently for the better part of a decade, it would be surprising if Americans hadn\u2019t yet recovered completely from their Bush fatigue.<\/p>\n

Bennett asserted that we shouldn\u2019t \u201cthrow out\u201d the entirety of Bush\u2019s presidency, for the 43rd<\/sup> president \u201cdid a lot of fine things.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Predictably\u2014incredibly?\u2014the only example of such \u201cfine things\u201d that Bennett offered was that of the Iraq War. \u201cWe won the war in Iraq,\u201d he declared definitively.<\/p>\n

Now, whether Bennett\u2019s judgment is accurate or not is not the issue. The point is that very few Americans think that Bennett and his ilk are correct on this score. And of those who sympathize with his position, most don\u2019t believe that the blood, time, and treasure our country invested in Iraq was worth it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t just Bennett who reminds voters of the Bush years. From talk radio and Fox News personalities to politicians like John McCain, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney himself, Republicans, whether inadvertently or otherwise, do so as well.<\/p>\n

Whenever Republicans accuse President Obama of being an \u201cappeaser\u201d or of \u201cleading from behind\u201d on the world stage, they remind voters of just how belligerent Bush\u2019s foreign policy really was.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bear in mind, Obama was responsible for \u201cthe surge\u201d of some 30,000 troops in Afghanistan.\u00a0 He deployed soldiers to Libya to assist rebels in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi, and invaded Pakistan to have Osama bin Laden assassinated.\u00a0 Obama has also arranged for repeated drone attacks on al-Qaida terrorists in this same country.<\/p>\n

In other words, Obama is no dove. He could never credibly be mistaken for a pacifist or even a non-interventionist.<\/p>\n

Republicans know this.\u00a0 While they blast him for being weak on foreign policy, they also describe his policies as being a continuation of those of Bush! They further concede that Obama is not an \u201cappeaser\u201d when they blast him for deliberately revealing to the media such national security related secrets as the drone attacks that he has authorized.<\/p>\n

When Republicans say that Obama is weak on national defense and foreign policy, what they can all too easily be interpreted as saying is that they do indeed want to \u201cbring that stuff back\u201d from the Bush years, to use Noonan\u2019s words.\u00a0 Actually, if Obama\u2019s policies are continuous with those of Bush, but Obama is too weak, then it would appear that Republicans want an agenda that is even more aggressive than that of Bush\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is all worth bringing up.\u00a0 Yet it is especially worthwhile doing so in the immediate aftermath of the American embassy attack that unfolded on our second 9\/11 in Libya.<\/p>\n

This latest event has thrust the issue of foreign policy to the forefront of an election season that has thus far involved relatively little talk of anything other than the economy.\u00a0 Romney has come out forcefully against Obama\u2019s response, in so many words repeating the Republican refrain of weakness against the latter.\u00a0 Romney has been no less forceful in condemning the murderous rioters who stormed the embassy.<\/p>\n

Romney\u2019s utterances here are understandable and probably, given his aspiration to unseat Obama, unavoidable.\u00a0 Perhaps they will even prove to be to his benefit.<\/p>\n

But they could also be a double-edged sword.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the absence of an unqualified promise to get our people the hell out of these Middle Eastern lands, it is with the greatest of ease that Romney\u2019s tough talk could suggest to many a voter that his administration would be at least another four more years of Bush.<\/p>\n

Since a majority of Americans will recoil from this idea, Romney and his fellow partisans may want to rethink their approach to our endless troubles in the Islamic world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, while on Meet the Press, Peggy Noonan offered some advice to Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Romney, she said, \u201chas to kick away from and define himself against what happened for the eight years of George W. Bush\u2019s presidency [.]\u201d I couldn\u2019t agree more.\u00a0 As Noonan rightly observes, not only…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nExorcising Neoconservative Ghosts<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/09\/exorcising-neoconservative-ghosts.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Exorcising Neoconservative Ghosts\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A couple of weeks ago, while on Meet the Press, Peggy Noonan offered some advice to Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. 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