Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Conservative columnist William F. Buckley recently wrote It Didn’t Work in which he states, “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.”

This implies the overall theme of the past 6 years of the Bush Presidency: he is learning on the job and we are paying for his education. This administration ignores scholarly research and planning, basing policy upon envisioned hopes, croney theories, and faith. More dangerous is their negligence and reluctance to admit mistakes until too late.

Another conservative voice echoing this sentiment is Bruce Bartlett. Mr. Bartlett served in the Reagan administration in the Office of Policy Development and in George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Department as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy. The title of Bruce’s new book, Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacyto speaks volumes.

On recent radio interviews Mr. Bartlett has compared President Bush’s style to Richard Nixon’s, with the obsessive secrecy that often accompanies corruption, and the avoidance of accountability. Former White House counsel to Richard M. Nixon, John Dean, has also makes a similar case in his book, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.

Last month I caught glimpses of early American history in the two part PBS series The War That Made Americanarrated by Graham Greene, an Oneida Indian. The program shows young George Washington, a 22 year old Virginia militia officer leading men west into the uncivilized Ohio country. He is an powerful six foot two inch woodsman, who understands the value in learning wilderness survival skills of the native Americans and forms alliances with Indian leaders in order to defeat the French’s ambitions to possess their share of the new frontier. Washington faces many dangerous battles with the French, Indians and Nature itself west of the Blue Ridge Mountains between 1754 and 1759, accompanied with legendary characters such as Daniel Boone at the Massacre at Monongahela.

Exhilarated to learn more of the dashing young Mr. Washington, I found just the right book, His Excellency: George Washingtonby Joseph J. Ellis. Published in 2004, the author is a scholar of the many Washington biographies and collections of letters, and therefore crafts a character study of George Washington the boy, the young man, and on through his life. The author’s goal is to tell the story of how great leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison each acknowledged Washington as their unquestioned superior.

In this book I learned George Washington’s father died when he was only eleven years old, and the old tale about “I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree,” is baloney. At 16 he was working at his fist job, on surveying expeditions in the Shenandoah Valley. Out in this country Washington kept a journal of the primitive conditions and sightings of Indians on scalping parties. The story continues to describe numerous encounters and battles where Washington is surrounded by dead and wounded, and miraculously comes out unharmed. By only age 23 his remarkable capacity to endure had marked him as a man of destiny.

“I may point out to the Public that heroic youth Col. Washington, who I cannot hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a Manner for some important Service to his Country.” – Reverend Samuel Davies.

Prophetic, and yet who then could imagine the legacy of our founding father would be inherited by what we have now?