The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Hardly Beating Around the Bush

I get the feeling this stunt could make for some pregnant pauses at the Bush kitchen table this Thanksgiving:

The announcement that this year’s George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service will go to Sen. Edward Kennedy is raising eyebrows in central Texas and beyond.

It isn’t just because Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, has often crossed swords with the former and current Bush administrations. While he disagreed with both administrations’ policies on Iraq, opposing both wars, his language has grown much stronger in recent weeks — to the point of questioning the current president’s honesty.

The award was announced by the Bush Library Foundation on Oct. 3, shortly after the senator asserted in September that the war in Iraq was a “fraud made up in Texas.”

“I can only assume [the decision] was made before Senator Kennedy accused the president of fraud and bribery,” said Marc Levin, president of the American Freedom Center. Levin, an Austin lawyer and conservative activist, is a former vice president of the Young Conservatives of Texas and has criticized Kennedy’s selection.

This is the same Ted Kennedy, mind you, that gave a speech last week slamming Bush for "refus[ing] to face the truth or tell the truth":

"Our men and women in uniform fought bravely and brilliantly, but the president's war has been revealed as mindless, needless, senseless, and reckless," Kennedy says, according to the text of his speech. "We should never have gone to war in Iraq when we did, in the way we did, for the false reasons we were given." ...

He continues: "All the administration's rationalizations as we prepared to go to war now stand revealed as double-talk. The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. He was not. We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction. He did not. We were told he was involved in 9/11. He was not. We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaeda. It was not. We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators. They are not. We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. It cannot. We were told the war would make America safer. It has not."

And the president's father is giving the man a public embrace? Good Lord — I half expect to look through the window in a minute and see the sun setting in the east.

Georgie Anne Geyer has a column that may come close to explaining what the elder Bush is up to:

Since the current President Bush veered away from the real war against terrorism in Afghanistan and went a'venturing in Iraq, much to his father's dismay, just about everybody close to Washington politics has known of the policy schism between father and son.

It was politically and philosophically obvious. But people around Father Bush, a coterie of traditional internationalist conservatives who protect him like a wolf mother does her cubs, would heatedly deny any family rift -- and nobody spoke publicly about it.

Now it's all out. Father Bush has done it in his own preferred nuanced way -- the way Establishment gentlemen operate -- but he has revealed the depth of his disagreement with his impetuously uninformed son.

And won't it be interesting to analyze the speeches citing Teddy, who is surely one of W's primary political nemeses, for his public service and principles at the Bush Library Center on the Texas A&M campus on Nov. 7? One can bet they will be subtle -- but also very clear.

If you ask me, the difference of opinion looks clear already. You almost have to wonder: next time these two see each other, are their Secret Service teams going to have to keep them from going at it?

Posted by Greg Greene at October 21, 2003 04:57 PM