George W. Bush

Bush Approval Rising, Now Equals Obama’s

Featured image “Miss me yet?” the billboards asked, early in Obama’s first term. It took a while, but more voters than ever are missing George W. Bush. His approval rating is now up to 47%, right around where President Obama has been in recent weeks. Expect it to keep rising, as Obama makes him look good by comparison. When President Bush left office, I gave his two terms a B-. I won’t »

The political price of the Iraq War

Featured image Michael Walsh at NRO blames the Obama presidency on the Iraq War. Taking things one step further, he blames the Clinton presidency on our first war in Iraq: Like father, like son. The first President Bush squandered sky-high poll ratings into a defeat at the hands of a man the nation barely knew, Bill Clinton, in part because of the unsatisfying end to the first Gulf War, which ended with »

Bombing the Syrian reactor

Featured image Elliott Abrams is the Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His CFR blog is Pressure Points. He served, most recently, on the staff of the National Security Council staff during the Bush administration commencing in June 2001, first as a deputy assistant to the president and later as deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. We recently featured a column by Abrams based »

Elliott Abrams: Tested by Zion, then and now

Featured image Elliott Abrams is the Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His CFR blog is Pressure Points. He served, most recently, on the staff of the National Security Council staff during the Bush administration commencing in June 2001, first as a deputy assistant to the president and later as deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. He is also the author of Tested By »

Watching “Zero Dark Thirty” with the CIA

Featured image Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen is an AEI fellow, a Washington Post columnist, and author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack. When it comes to the techniques used by the CIA to interrogate detainees in the aftermath of 9/11, Thiessen knows what he is talking about. Prompted by the controversy over Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty and its »

Clearing my spindle: I’m Not OK edition

Featured image I think the following items will be of interest to Power Line readers. I’d like to bring them to your attention without much comment. While our attention was turned elsewhere this past October, the space shuttle Endeavour made its final journey: it traveled 12-miles from Los Angeles International Airport, through Inglewood, to the California Science Center in Exposition Park. Reader Zack Russ writes that he came across this wonderful time-lapse »

Learning from “Zero Dark Thirty”

Featured image New York Post film critic Kyle Smith has seen two previews of Zero Dark Thirty, the Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller that is opening in New York and Los Angeles just in time for Oscar consideration. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, the team responsible for The Hurt Locker, the film promised to be something more than an advertisement for Barack Obama, although the filmmakers famously had »

The economy and the election

Featured image Please don’t miss Allahpundit’s analysis of the national exit poll. For that matter, check out the poll numbers themselves. I want to focus on the data about the economy, since the exit poll confirms that this was, primarily, an election about the economy. To understand how President Obama won an election about the economy is this weak economy, consider two sets of numbers. First, 39 percent of voters think the »

Does Obama ’12 equal Bush ’04? The President can only hope so

Featured image Barack Obama began his presidency expecting to be the next Abraham Lincoln. Now, he hopes he can be George W. Bush. This is evident from his campaign strategy. Team Obama understands that it can’t campaign on its man’s record. However, it views Obama’s opponent as John Kerry redux — a rich, out of touch Massachusetts man who is easily ridiculed and plausibly demonized. Thus, Obama and his advisers hope to »

Uncommon Knowledge with George W. Bush

Featured image Peter Robinson recently sat down with President Bush in Dallas to record an interview for Uncommon Knowledge. Two books provide the frame for the interview. In Decision Points, now out in paperback, Bush looks back on his presidency. The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs is a collection of essays edited by Brendan Miniter with a foreword by Bush and derived from the George W. Bush Institute. One »

How to praise your predecessor with class

Featured image I wrote here about President Obama’s remarks during the ceremony in which portraits of George W. and Laura Bush were unveiled at the White House. Unfortunately, Obama found it difficult to offer any praise of Bush that did not refer, usually self-servingly, to himself. And, I wrote, to the very limited extent that Obama managed to offer such praise, “there wasn’t much warmth or charity in it – it fell »

Bush portraits unveiled at White House; Obama is “congenial”

Featured image Former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura returned to the White House today for the unveiling of their portraits. The former President’s parents – themselves a former President and a former First Lady – were also in attendance. They received the longest ovation of the day. President and Ms. Obama both spoke. Peter Wehner, who was present as a former member of the Bush staff, got it exactly »