Getting Back to Essentials

The ever-essential Anchoress has an outstanding post that looks back on President Bush's accomplishments. She has not been surprised by much of it and what has surprised her just shows how consistently George W. Bush is a man who does what he says he will do. What is heartbreaking about this post is her lamentation, which is right on target, that his base has turned and attacked him for that very consistency to his word.

Imagine that. Imagine being the guy who has given his base one splendid nominee after another, in all manner of posts, make a nomination he thinks appropriate only to find that “base” coming out with both guns, defaming his nominee and directing all manner of insult at himself. President Bush is nothing if not loyal; his loyalty is often his downfall. When he asked for a little trust (which he had surely earned) a little loyalty and a little faith, from “the base,” he got kicked in the groin, over and over again, for daring to think differently, for falling out of lockstep with his policy-wonk “betters.”

That had to be bitter, for him. At that point Bush, unchanged in essentials, might have wondered if his conservative “base” had become a bit over-confident and loose-hipped, so cock-sure of their majority (not that congress used it) so certain of their own brilliance that they were beginning to believe they didn’t need him; that he wasn’t conservative enough, after all, and that the next president was going to be the solid, “uncompassionate” conservative they’d really wanted all along. The president who had delivered one gift after another to his base asked them to trust him, and his base sneered.

Do go read the whole thing if for no other reason than to remember all the great things that he has done.