Consider the Alternatives

Ann Coulter is unfashionably complimenting George Bush on the job he has done. Although I think she’s bad for the GOP, and I will never be able to support her until she apologizes for calling Muslims “camel jockeys” and “tent merchants,” she is usually right on the money. Apart from the slurs. Even today she can’t resist pointing out–clearly in a pejorative way–that Detroit is full of Arabs. If she were criticizing their support for our enemies, I’d be right behind her. But that’s not what she did. She just commented on their presence and left readers to connect the dots.

The current trend is to bash old George and pretend you never supported the war. Even O’Reilly now says the war was a mistake. Which says a lot about O’Reilly but nothing about the war. I still think George Bush has been an exceptionally competent President, and I support our troops (which means I support their mission). I’m not happy with every aspect of the Bush Presidency, but think where we would be if we had elected Al Gore.

Actually, things might not be so bad. We would have had a series of economic, military, and diplomatic catastrophes between 2001 and 2004, and then we would have elected another Republican. And we would still control Congress. Assuming we were not ruled by a caliphate.

President Bush gave the country a much-needed and highly effective shot in the arm by slashing taxes. He did a great deal to end the Clinton recession (yes, it began under Clinton). He restored the Clinton-hamstrung military and gave our troops back their dignity. He scared the living hell out of our enemies, to the point where one of the worst, Muammar Khaddafi, became a peace activist. He prevented terrorism on US soil, in spite of determined liberal efforts to remove obstacles and provide incentives. And we rewarded him by voting America-hating, venal, immature, unpatriotic Sixties holdouts into Congress, and by treating him like a lump of plutonium.

I wish he would work to establish a bigger, more powerful Israel, instead of pushing for retreat. He is criticized for criticizing appeasers, but the truth is, he has done some damaging appeasing of his own. I wish he had never hired Colin Powell. I wish he had had the common sense to abandon his ill-fated and naive “reaching across the aisle” approach, which has never been rewarded with anything but betrayal. I wish he had fired half of the CIA and the State Department, with their treacherous, left-leaning ways. And he should have gotten rid of incompetent and disloyal Clinton holdovers, and he should never have tried to help Mrs. McClellan by giving her hopeless, inept, spineless, lying, whining weasel of a son a job for which he was not qualified. But George Bush kept the ship afloat in troubled times, and that is something neither Gore nor Kerry could have done.

George Bush even tried to fix our energy problems. Bill Clinton had no energy policy. When Clinton’s term ended, George Bush wanted to expand domestic drilling. His administration met with the correct people, oil men, to get the ball rolling. And the greenies and hippies handed him his head for it. If he had gotten his way, we would have a million more barrels coming out of the ground every day. That’s a big deal. OPEC only produces about ten times that much. And did you know the affected area is only about twice the size of Cental Park? No, not if you get your news from the liberal media. For a million barrels a day, we would trade an area the size of a nice farm. That’s a good trade, even if every caribou on the parcel has to be waterboarded. And ANWR is just part of the picture. Think of the offshore sites we’re not allowed to drill.

The hippies caused our energy problems. They filled their diapers over safe, cheap, clean, abundant nuclear power, and amazingly, we treated them as though they were worthy of attention, and we stunted an industry that could have put an end to oil-fired power plants. They fought to keep refineries from being built. They crippled the coal industry. And somehow, we have decided that Big Oil and SUVs are what put us where we are. Meanwhile, France–the model nation for hippies everywhere–is something like 80% nuclear. Go figure.

You can get a nuclear plant going in under five years, if you actually want to do it. If we had started building new ones in 2000, we could have had them running by now. Think how much better life would be.

The thing no one seems to understand is that the hippies don’t want us to have energy. They think the world is a museum exhibit, and the human race is like a kid in the museum, spray-painting his name on the relics. They want us to use as little energy as possible, so we affect the planet as little as possible. Sane people want industry. They want big, safe cars. They want construction. They want retail sales to boom. Because those things generate wealth, which–the hippies will never understand–is the thing that provides us with shelter, medicine, food, education, and the hippie’s holy grail, peace. Only a fool wants the human race to do less. The answer is to do more. And to do more, you need more energy.

The earth is not sacred. It’s not an organism. It’s a ball of dirt, put here for our benefit. It has no mind. It has no soul. It has no rights. We are more important than the earth. We are more important than caribou and polar bears and snail darters. People with common sense know this without being told. Hippies will never know it, because their religion denies it. Yet we allow them to make policy. So we are being driven toward a condition in which we sit around our dilapidated homes, trying in vain to grow food without chemicals, with a shriveled economy and a vestigial national defense. The hippies won’t be happy until we live like Africans. Some realize this and think it’s a fine idea. Some are so dumb they don’t realize this is the direction in which they are pushing us.

I said France was the model nation for hippies, but that’s not true. The real model nation would be something more like rural Sudan, where people face starvation, ignorance, poverty, and anarchy. This is the left’s utopian destination, whether they realize it or not. Sudan. Or North Vietnam. Or North Korea, where educated, industrious, disciplined, law-abiding people fall down in the street, die of malnourishment, and rot in public. At best, the former USSR.

Oil men and carmakers and manufacturers blessed us with the world’s strongest economy and most powerful military. They gave us the highest standard of living in the world. They made it possible for the world to defeat Hitler and Communism. Name something of equal value greenies have done for us.

To get back to George Bush, I’m glad I didn’t abandon him the way everyone else has. He has his weak points, but like Winston Churchill in World War Two, he was the right man at the right time. Ann Coulter is right to back him up.