Bush: Cementing The Legacy - With Concrete Galoshes

As you may know, I've had ambivalent feelings about George Bush for about, oh, 4+ years now, but something happened recently that changed all that. So now, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy for me.

But before I get to the heart of the matter, let's dance around the edges for a bit - you know, like Bush did in Saudi Arabia the other day? I mean, am I the only one who is seeing his trip to the Middle East as surreal?

In Israel, Bush wasn't just clueless, he was profoundly and sanctimoniously clueless.

And I think those two words characterize his whole Presidency - Sanctimoniously Clueless. The only trouble is, if I leave it there, it absolves him - and conservatives of responsibility, 70 to 85 percent of whom apparently think Bush has done at least an OK job. You wonder, do they think that way about Republicans in Congress as well? Because the truth is, there are probably no more than five decent Republicans and Bush sure ain't one of them.

Here's a guy who has spent the last X number of years selling out conservatives and his country, and he's not even content with that, now he's busily selling out Israel. Right now, we stand at the precipice of another Carter-like recession, and do you see Bush doing anything besides dancing with Saudi royalty?

But that's just what he's doing in public. Jeff Jacoby asks today, "Whatever happened to the moral clarity that informed the president's worldview in the wake of 9/11?"

What is he referring to? It's the fact that the Bush Doctrine is dead

Its demise was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Friday... aboard Air Force One en route with the president to Kuwait from Israel. She was explaining why the administration had abandoned the most fundamental condition of its support for Palestinian statehood - an end to Palestinian terror (and it) was as striking for its candor as for its moral blindness:

"The 'road map' for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one."

"Neither side ever began discussing the 'core issues': the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border, and the future of Jerusalem."

Are you grasping that, you 85 percent of conservatives who think Bush had a successful 2007?

The core issues have nothing to do with killing Jews. Do you think that's just Rice's idea?

And she wasn't done:

"We haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase... which was the actual negotiations of final status... What the US-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was 'break that tight sequentiality. . . You don't want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven't fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure..."

So you need to make a choice: Bush or morality? Unless you think Jeff Jacoby made that up?

Jacoby:

Thus the president who once insisted that a "Palestinian state will never be created by terror" now insists that a Palestinian state be created regardless of terror. Once the Bush administration championed a "road map" whose first and foremost requirement was that the Palestinians "declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism" and shut down "all official... incitement against Israel." Now the administration says that Palestinian terrorism and incitement are nothing "to get hung up on."

Maybe conservatives don't want to get hung up on it either? If not, then truly, as Greg Gutfeld says, they're worse than Hitler. For as Jeff Jacoby says, "(Bush) is hellbent... on bestowing statehood upon a regime that stands unequivocally with the terrorists.

There was our leader last week, standing there in his flowing robes of naked absurdity, saying, "I believe there will be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office,"

There's your bumper sticker for this election year: "A Palestinian State in 2008" - or bust.