September 30, 2007
Bill Sammon, the author of The Evangelical President: George Bush’s Struggle to Spread a Moral Democracy Throughout the World, cannot be labeled a critic of President Bush. As both the senior White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a reporter for the Washington Times, he’s had greater access to the President than any other journalist. And his book has been published by Regnery, which, under the leadership of its founder, Henry Regnery, would have opposed the errors of this presidency; today, however, it’s just another neocon publishing house, toeing the party line.
Sammon’s impeccable pro-Bush Republican credentials make it all the more odd that more isn’t being made of the book’s revelation that President Bush is privately offering advice to top Democratic candidates, including Sen. Hillary Clinton:
“It’s different being a candidate and being the president,” Bush said in an Oval Office interview. “No matter who the president is, no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and seriously consider the effect of a vacuum being created in the Middle East, particularly one trying to be created by al Qaeda, they will then begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”
So Bush, “mostly through aides,” has been advising Clinton and other Democrats, as well as “institutionalizing controversial anti-terror programs so they can be used by the next president.”
Combine this revelation with President Bush’s recent nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general. It would seem that President Bush is less concerned with the Republican Party maintaining control of the White House (so that, for instance, it might do something about abortion) than he is with making sure that the War and Torture Party stays in power. Giuliani and Clinton are both acceptable, so long as they continue his policies in Iraq and the “War on Terror.”
That should give pause to those who argue that pro-lifers have no choice but to support the Republican Party, come hell or high water. It should, but it won’t.
