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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
George W. Bush, giant 'pander-bear'
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- President George W. Bush's occasional broken syntax is not a felony.
Last week's presidential primary in South Carolina reminded me of the ugly brawl between then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., four years earlier in the Palmetto state when an exasperated Bush criticized McCain: "The Senator has got to understand if he's going to have -- he can't have it both ways. He can't take the high horse and then claim the low road."
Who can forget LaCrosse , Wisc., only eight months later, where Bush declared: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." To his credit, at a Washington dinner, the president showed he could laugh at these "Bushisms" when he quoted humorist Garrison Keillor's observation that "George W. Bush's lips are where words go to die."
But there are a couple of things this president says repeatedly that truly drive me bananas. For example, because the president's one-size-fits-all remedy for every social ill from joblessness to double-parking is more tax-cuts, the president must have told me three or four dozen times by now that "it's your money."
Not only that, but opponents of Bush's tax cuts, according to the president, just "want more money in Washington" and "don't want to let the people keep their own money." President Bush and his administration, you should know, "trust the American people more than we trust the government."
George W. Bush is a Giant "Pander-Bear." With such talk, he asks me -- at a time of war when my fellow Americans are dying -- for no sacrifice. He essentially absolves me of civic responsibility to my fellow citizens and to my national community. He flatters my vanity. He indulges my selfishness.
You begin to wonder if the president or anyone near him knows that of the 53.7 million American children who will go to school today from kindergarten to grade 12, nearly nine out of 10 of them will go to public schools.
The most advantaged and the most privileged do not depend on public education or public safety for their family's personal security, or public parks for their recreation. If you're wealthy enough, you can purchase all of these services privately.
But the vast majority of Americans depend every hour of every day on public services provided by their government and funded by our tax dollars.
Government is far from perfect. It is flawed and can be unresponsive. But make no mistakes about it, government does good things I want done for my country but which I cannot do alone.
Because of the federal government, I know the medicine prescribed for my family is safe. Because of the federal government, more than three-fourths of the nation's rivers and streams are today swimmable and fishable, while only 30 years ago, three-quarters of those same rivers -- because of industrial waste and untreated sewage -- were unswimmable and unfishable.
Because of the federal government, financed by the tax dollars we sent to Washington, polio was cured, the poverty rate among senior citizens has been cut by 70 percent, 289 million visitors annually enjoy our national parks and monuments, the airplane trips we take are safe, and the civil right of every American to vote is secure.
Four out of five Americans who today attend college do not go to a Yale or a Princeton or a Duke or a Georgetown or any other private school. They go instead to a public college or university that is financed by tax dollars.
So do me a favor, President, treat us like grown-ups. We know that even if we kept every nickel of taxes, we would not be able individually to do the urgently important tasks our federal government does to make our nation safer, healthier, more prosperous and more just.
And remember the wisdom of a great Republican predecessor of yours, Theodore Roosevelt, who said, "We are the government; the government is us."
