Bush = protectionist + AA supporter + social conservative Every once in a while, some news article makes me feel the need to vent about Bush. Recently I read about the Kass commission's soon-to-be-announced decision supporting a research cloning moratorium, and I felt the need to explain one more time just why Bush is an awful president. 1) Bush supports Affirmative Action (AA) Bush supports amnesty for illegal aliens. He's practiced blatant AA with his cabinet and judiciary appointments. Now, perhaps the AA cabinet is necessary to ward off charges of racism. But the amnesty proposal is moronic and so is the de facto ban on racial profiling carried out by Mineta at the airports and Ashcroft on the streets. His pandering to minorities hasn't paid off in votes. In fact, his justice department under Ashcroft has vigorously argued the pro-AA case in the courts. Bush isn't just "not an opponent" of AA - he's a champion of AA. 2) Bush is a protectionist Europe may start a trade war partly because of these steel tariffs - see news.google.com for the $7B sanctions the WTO just approved. I'm hardly one to support the European side over the US, but they really do have a point this time. How shortsighted can Bush be? He doesn't even win votes-wise, as he alienates free traders and the vastly larger section of the economy that consumes steel rather than produces it. The steel tariffs aren't the only thing - he's also supported the dairy compact and the textile tariffs. One thing is indisputable: Clinton was a hell of a lot better on free trade. Bush is a protectionist. 3) Bush is a social conservative Bush's social conservatism matters in terms of what Ashcroft will enforce. Little things like the ban on scholarships for drug users, the prosecution of pornographers, and the coverup of the justice department statues start to add up. Abortion isn't really going to be banned, though they're making it more and more difficult to get abortion on demand. His support for government funding of religious charity centers (pre 9-11) was likewise motivated by his social conservatism. Perhaps the WORST feature of his social conservatism was the appointment of the Kass commission and the ban on stem cell research; that directly affected research and has been a huge pain in the ass. The Kass commission is going to announce a full fledged moratorium on all kinds of stuff related to stem cells and human research, and if the ban's term lasts long enough scientists will seriously consider leaving the country to pursue research elsewhere. (Singapore in particular looks promising.) The one good thing to come out of his social conservatism was the effort to encourage marriage among welfare mothers - I don't know where that's headed, though, and it's small change compared to the stem-cell issue. We are talking about national security in the race with China, and Bush is willing to piss it away for the idiotic Christian right constituency....arrrrgh. Makes me see red just thinking about it. One other thing - Bush is far less pro-science than Gore is. Several important positions remained unfilled for months and months (some of which are still unfilled). He's supported the conversion of Lawrence Livermore Labs to a defense oriented research facility - also idiotic. 4) Bush's terrorism policy leaves much to be desired Finally, as for foreign policy & terrorism, the ONE good thing Bush has done so far is invade Afghanistan. Homeland security with its color codes and nailclipper seizures is a joke, as is the new and massive 200000 person bureacracy he hopes to create. If he successfully takes out Iraq and establishes a US protectorate, I'll give him big props. But I don't think he'll play his cards right. The smart thing to do would be to broadcast Hussein's nascent nuclear weapons program 24 hours a day on CNN to show everyone that we were the cop with a good hunch rather than the evil preemptive strike nation. This would be a big fat "I told you so" to the anti-war Europeans. But I doubt he'll be smart enough to do that. 5) Bush is hopelessly inarticulate. Perhaps Bush's stilted speech is not representative of his hitherto hidden intellect. But I doubt it. As I said in an earlier post:

Yet I have seen nothing from Bush that hints at high intelligence. I think it indisputable that Bush regularly mangles both argument and grammar in his public utterances. The latter is forgivable, but the former is not. Did you see the first debate with Gore? Have you ever heard Bush speak without a prompter on the issues? It is not my opinion as a scientist that Bush is unintelligent, but it is certainly my personal opinion. ... I have never seen Bush respond to a substantive policy question with anything more than a stock answer, and I've watched a lot of Bush press conferences. I can only compare it to a professor who's unable to answer questions that require answers more complicated than a quote from the textbook. On policy matters, Bush ostensibly wrote the "textbook", yet he seems so unfamiliar with its contents that the White House regularly issues corrections on what the president "really meant". Not only is he inarticulate, he is neither well read nor curious to find out what he's missing. The man quoted "Jesus" as his favorite philosopher. Jesus! Now, perhaps my atheist bias may be showing, but I doubt that Bush would have been able to fill spots two through five on that list of the all time philosophical greats. Whether you believe that Jesus was really Bush's favorite philosopher or not, such a remark is equivalent to answering "E=mc^2" to "what's your favorite equation?" or "Einstein" to "who's your favorite scientist?". It's not that it's impossible that these are indeed the favorite equation or scientist, but rather that there is immediate doubt as to whether the questioned individual has any knowledge of science beyond popular culture.