August 22, 2010

Apparently Liz Trotta has dispatched a team of investigators to Martha's Vineyard to check on t-shirt sales and they discovered that Sarah Palin is very popular there, or she's just making stuff up. She also thinks that we shouldn't take any attack ads about George Bush seriously because some of the beltway Villagers that she decides to label as the "far left" said some nice thing about George Bush and his insistence that we don't conflate the religion of Islam with terrorism. It's all an evil plot by the terrible "liberal media" where they're pretending to miss Bush now, only to attack him later when the mid-term elections come around, or something.

What Trotta really doesn't want to discuss here is that Republicans would like to keep George Bush locked away somewhere far from sight until the mid-term elections are over and aren't happy about the timing of the release of his new book.

Trotta: Well, let me give you... in keeping with the spirit of what we've just seen, you know, the president is a... President Obama is vacationing up at Martha's Vineyard and apparently the t-shirt that's selling the most is one that deals with President Bush and it says “Miss me yet?” Apparently the subtitle says, "How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for ya'? " Well we know where that would come from.

But that's the funny part. The serious part is yes, there are invocations to Bush. the Washington Post editorials, their columnists; namely Eugene Robinson " you can't get any more far left than that. And the New York Times and of course Maureen Dowd are all making the case he took the right stand on the... the right Constitutional stand, the right First Amendment stand when it came to separating terrorists from the Muslim... from the Islamic religion.

And so there's what what looks to be a sort of nostalgia at first glance about Bush. What you are seeing from the liberal media is attempt to use his arguments to further their own cause; and that is, that the mosque should be banned. So, I don't think we should take much of it seriously.

Howard Fineman of course of Newsweek did a sort of half serious piece saying that because of Obama's sinking popularity, because of the economy, because of the upcoming elections, there is this kind of wistfulness for Bush and he does have a book coming out.

But don't be too sure that this isn't just a prelude. They are going to kick Bush around during the election and the papers are already talking about how he will be the number one issue in the mid-term elections. So, again, what you've got is the liberal media using President Bush's words to further their own argument and that is that nobody should confuse Islamic terrorists with Islam.

Bream: It is interesting, though. Some of the columnists that you mentioned, specifically Maureen Dowd or Eugene Robinson, I mean to think that they would ever have anything to say even slightly positive about President Bush only a couple years after he's gone and there is talk history will treat him differently. But with his name coming up so much now, he's got a book coming out and he has been very careful not to wade into the mosque debate, though he has been asked to. Is it good time for him to have a bit of publicity with that book coming?

Trotta: Well before we go too far with this argument of how everybody wants to see him again let me "call your attention" to something that appeared online in the The Daily Beast, one of the well-known liberal outlets and it's written by Peter Beinart, a well known liberal. he says:

Words I never thought I'd write: I pine for George W. Bush. Whatever his flaws, the man respected religion, all religion. Maybe it was because he had been an addict himself and knew from hanging around prisons that Allah had saved as many broken soul as Jesus Christ.

Well, there you go, you see this is the damning with feigned phrase. And so when you really read this, replete with all its mistakes about George Bush being in prison -- I mean, really -- you know where the left is coming from. Don't take it seriously.

Bream: Well alright. It will be interesting to hear from him this fall on that book tour as he has been, you know, very polite and laid very low throughout controversy over the last couple of years. Liz Trotta thank you very much.

Trotta: Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon