the tindog coffeehouse

In keeping with this week’s “presidential exit interview” theme, I thought it would be good to take a look at President Bush’s interview with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden, which aired on Nightline earlier in the week.

The part of the interview that seems to be getting the most attention is when McFadden asks the President about his faith. While some of the answers are pretty good, there are a few that I disagree with.

Below are some of his responses and my comments on them. (And by the way, I’m sorry for the extremely long post here.)

Bush said he is often asked if he thinks he was chosen by God to be president.

“I just, I can’t go there,” he said. “I’m not that confident in knowing, you know, the Almighty, to be able to say, ‘Yeah, God wanted me of all the other people.’ My relationship [with God] is on a personal basis trying to become as closer to the Almighty as I possibly can get. And I’ve got a lot of problems. I mean, I got, you know, the ego … all the things that prevent me from being closer to the Almighty. So, I don’t analyze my relationship with the good Lord in terms of, well, you know, God has plucked you out or God wants you to do this. I know this: I know that the call is to better understand and live out your life according to the will of God.”

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National Review’s Jay Nordlinger had a chance to interview President Bush about his presidency and put a whole bunch of quotes from the interview into his column.

Here are a few of the more interesting ones, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

On the troop surge in Iraq:

“And I can’t remember the moment, but I know full well [National Security Adviser] Steve [Hadley] and I said, ‘We’re going to figure out and get to the bottom of this thing . . .’ And you’ve got to understand: With me, I’m thinking victory the whole time. And I fully understood the consequences of defeat — which are easier to explain, by the way, than the consequences of victory. And so we started to assess, and the different options started bubbling up, I guess, toward the end of the summer [’06] . . .

“The way it should work for a president on a decision this big is to make sure everybody has a chance to express themselves. I guess you could try to hastily make a decision of this magnitude and say, ‘This is the way it is.’ On the other hand, when you’re implementing a decision of this magnitude, where people’s lives would be at stake, it is important to give a lot of different stakeholders a chance to express their opinion. The president says, ‘It’s not working, we must assess, and what is it going to take to win?’

“And there were a lot of opinions during this period of time — a lot. Which is good for the president. You really don’t want homogenized decision-making. And opinions ranged from Get out, to Get out of Baghdad, step back, and hope the violence which will occur as a result of the vacuum doesn’t spill out.” Some people said, “Okay, some troops” — and eventually, “as a result of a lot of interagency working,” there were 30,000 additional troops: the surge. “Why? Because that’s what it would take to win, or to achieve the objective.”

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President Bush (and yes, he’s still the president for two more months!) has come to the defense of free-market capitalism, rejecting calls from other nations for extreme regulation of financial markets:

“Government intervention is not a cure-all,” Bush was to say in New York, according to prepared remarks released in advance by the White House. …

“The crisis was not a failure of the free market system,” Bush said. “And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” …

“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market but too much,” Bush said. “It would a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I made a similar point, although not as explicitly, a few weeks ago:

Yes, tighter regulation of U.S. financial markets is necessary, especially in the short term. But the government is not the best decider of supply and demand; just ask the Soviet Union. So in that regard, we need to give the market plenty of room to sort itself out.

Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of President Bush’s ill-executed “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and of course the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq press were very quick to use it as another opportunity to label Iraq (and Bush) as a failure.

For all the polls and statistics, though, something occurred to me as I was driving home from work yesterday. Where have all the patriotic “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon magnets gone? It used to be not so long ago that maybe every fourth or fifth car you saw had some variant of these magnets on them, either the traditional yellow variety or maybe the red, white, and blue version, perhaps even a camouflage version. There were also a lot patriotic bumper stickers or other stickers on car windows. Today? Very few.

Yesterday I began watching other cars (in addition to watching the road), looking for a patriotic sticker or magnet on the back of cars. Out of the maybe couple thousand cars I saw during my hour-plus drive home, I saw two cars with a “Support Our Troops” magnet. Two.

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