The Left is running the West – economically, culturally, and politically. Even when we have a right-wing national leader in name (like Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson) they govern like lefties.

These things go in cycles and let’s hope this particular cycle is at its apogee … but how did we get here? Three woeful and avoidable events is how: the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Florida Recount, and the invasion of Iraq.

In 1991 the Soviet Union crumbled and the former communist bloc opened its arms to the West. Free enterprise, democracy, and American (i.e. Republican) leadership had triumphed. The following year, Democrat Bill Clinton was lucky to be elected President after a preincarnation of Trump, Ross Perot, won 19 per cent of the vote.

In his first two years, Clinton governed like a typical Democrat and got his bum kicked badly in the 1994 mid-terms. For the first time in 50 years, Republicans had a majority in the House and a comfortable one too. The party also moved from minority to majority in the Senate. These Republicans were not the establishment types from the country club – these were Reaganites. Clinton ‘triangulated’ which is the best spin he could come up with for agreeing almost entirely with the Republicans ‘Contract with America’. Barack Obama later found himself in a similar situation, but Obama was an ideologue and, unlike chameleon Clinton, chose gridlock.

When Clinton says America boomed under his presidency he is correct but disingenuous – America boomed because House Speaker, Republican Newt Gingrich, got bill after bill approved by congress and then drove over to the White House where Clinton signed off. The two almost co-equals became reasonably friendly – they had little to argue about beyond the margin. Taxes were cut, spending was cut, welfare was cut, law and order enforced, and business boomed.

It worked so well Clinton wanted the credit which Gingrich didn’t seem to mind – what greater victory than have the opposition sing your song? In his 1996 State of the Union, Clinton declared:

‘We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.’

America was happy and when America’s happy, the world is generally happy. There were friendships and goodwill across the aisle. Votes in congress were cast by individuals – not like today’s strict party line divisions. There were a few Bernie Sanders types in the Democrat caucus in the 1990s but they were a fringe. Events would soon unfold which would lead to that fringe dominating one of America’s great parties.

The first woeful decision began in late January 1998 when Monica Lewinsky hit the headlines. Clinton had lied under oath … which of course is a no-no, but a President can only be removed from office if they have committed a ‘high crime’. Lying about an extra-martial affair has been happening since forever – it’s a moral crime, not a high crime. Clinton deserved a reprimand that fell short of impeachment. But no, the Republicans declared political war.

Throughout that process, the polls were on Clinton’s side. Nevertheless, the impeachment pressed on. What made the Republican Party look like not just the prudish party and the mean party but also the hypocritical party is that the leader of the impeachment, Gingrich, had himself fallen in love with his staffer. They subsequently married and it has been a very happy union but, what was the great Newt thinking to lead impeachment while cheating on his then-wife? Gingrich resigned over that affair but it got worse. The GOP chose Bob Livingston as its candidate for Speaker. That vote didn’t get to the floor of the House because Hustler Magazine exposed that Livingston had conducted at least four affairs.

Post Monica, America was on a slippery slope to polarisation, but it was easily correctable at this point. The slope however was about to become a cliff. It is hard to remember but during the presidential campaign of 2000, Al Gore was derided as a pensive, wooden policy wonk while George W Bush was the confident, charming Governor of Texas. On election night, Gore conceded the presidency to Bush but an hour later retracted it. The next day a conspicuous boil appeared on Bush’s face and VP-elect (sort of) Dick Cheney had a mild heart attack. These were tense days. The world was gripped by this highest-stakes drama.

Over five weeks Gore took it all the way to the Supreme Court and lost 5-4. Gore should have heeded Richard Nixon’s 1960 precedent and not contest a freakishly close presidential election. America had become two nations in one. The Florida Recount gave us the labels ‘red state’ and ‘blue state’. 35 of the 50 states have voted for the same party in every presidential election since.

When Bush was inaugurated thousands of protestors turned up screaming abuse about a ‘stolen election’ and throwing eggs. It was unprecedented but just the beginning. Gore and his angry supporters incessantly claimed Bush was illegitimate: ‘Bush lost the popular vote and his daddy’s mates on the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.’ Bush went from confident to doubtful, cheerful to nervous. He wasn’t presidential enough to not let it weigh him down.

Eight months into his presidency was 9/11. Bush’s approval hit soared above 90 per cent (the highest ever) in the immediate wake. America was briefly united and in agreement – the regime in Afghanistan must be toppled. Less than a month after the Twin Towers fell, the invasion began and six weeks later America was running Afghanistan. The Americans enjoyed the support of many local allies in that campaign. They should have identified the friendliest warlord, loaded him up with guns and dollars and said, ‘you run the joint – if we can help from afar let us know but we are going home now.’

Bush however decided to stay and oversee the revival of that long-held Afghani tradition of democracy (ha). I was hopeful Afghanistan could be like Germany and Japan in 1945 – rapidly transform from a tyranny to a liberalised democracy. Wiser heads didn’t agree, but they were a minority in those heady days. In early 2002, Operation Enduring Freedom was looking like yet another American success story. Bush’s approval was still stratospheric.

Meanwhile, in the White House there were long meetings – what now? Some suggested the Administration use its capital to deal with Saddam Hussein once and for all. Hussein’s Iraq had enjoyed good relations with the West during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and he had spent his life battling Islamic extremists. In retrospect, Bush should have phoned Saddam after 9/11 and offered to lift the sanctions in exchange for cooperation in the War on Terror. Saddam would have jumped at the opportunity. Isn’t Saddam a baddie? Yes, but it is hard to imagine he would have killed anywhere near as many Iraqis as the Bush war did. Lifting the sanctions would more likely have brought about gradual liberalisation and today tourists could be wandering some of mankind’s most ancient sites.

After Bush Sr had liberated Kuwait in 1992 prominent figures urged him to keep going to Baghdad. Bush Sr said no. Conservative writer Paul Johnson’s 1,000-page tome, The History of the American People was published in late 1990s. He spoke for many when he was bitterly critical of Bush Sr for not marching on Baghdad. We now know Bush Sr made the wise decision but he was henceforth derided as a wimp.

George W Bush became president because his surname was Bush. Everybody knew it. Bush knew it. On top of that, Gore had cast a robe of illegitimacy over his presidency … so Bush calculates, ‘I’ll show them all – I’ll do what daddy didn’t. I’ll get Saddam!’

Of course, Bush couldn’t announce a war because he wanted to prove himself. The justification had to match the mood: ‘Saddam was somehow sorta involved with 9/11 plus he definitely has Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) so we need regime change to prevent him using them.’ They knew WMD was BS all along. If not, then surely it was obvious when America spent months in 2002 building bases along the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border – if Saddam had WMD why didn’t he unleash them on those bases? The UN weapons inspectors looked everywhere for WMD but found nothing. Federal MP, Andrew Wilkie, was an intelligence analyst at the Australian Office of National Assessments in Canberra prior to the Iraq War. He honourably resigned his job so he could tell the public the WMD story was fake news. It was all disregarded. Bush wanted this war. It was a tectonic error.

‘Their military is very weak. It’s a fraction of the size it was when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Most of what remains is poorly trained, poorly equipped and of questionable loyalty to the regime. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program is, I believe, genuinely contained,’ said Wilkie, at the time.

For the next decade and a half (until President Donald Trump) the poor old Middle East had rivers of blood, all caused by the destabilisation associated with the Iraq War.

America lost in Iraq. Losing a war is not just losing on the battlefield. The loser suffers domestically. It’s the ultimate failure and who wants to be led by ultimate failure? Spain was the world’s dominant power until King Phillip II decided in 1588 to invade England. Francis Drake however sunk the Armada and that was the moment Spain’s dominance of the world began slipping. Same thing for then-dominant France after it lost the Seven Years War in 1763. The troubles of the last Russian Tsar began when he lost the war against Japan in 1904. Bush’s Iraq folly damaged the credibility of the Republican establishment in the eyes of the world, America, and the party’s supporters. Most significantly the radical wing of the Democratic Party grew in strength with Americans outraged over the Iraq debacle.

By the time of the 2004 presidential election the war was going badly but it wasn’t completely terrible. All the Democrat candidates for president (bar Howard Dean) began the primary campaign in favour of the war but as time went by they all came out against (bar Joe Lieberman). Bush won by the narrowest margin of a re-elected president since 1948. With a full term ahead of him, however, Bush had to take out the trash early … and what a streaming pile of trash it was.

On 31 March 2005 the ‘Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction’ released its report. Bush had commissioned the report a year earlier when questions about WMD (or the lack thereof) wouldn’t go away. Bush had timed the report to come out post the 2004 election. The world was informed that Iraq had possessed no WMD. Two years into ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom,’ lots of Americans and a lot more Iraqis were dying and it was now all officially based on faulty intelligence at best. It was blamed on the Republican Party.

The 2006 mid-terms demonstrated the new voter sentiment. 33 senate races were contested – the Republicans won nine and the Democrats won 22 plus senate control. In the House, Democrats took power and Nancy Pelosi became Speaker. The next year Bush’s ‘man of steel’ in Australia, John Howard lost office (and his seat) – the Iraq mess was a big factor. The year after that America’s mood was so anti-Republican the nation did something it hadn’t done since the 1930s – it elected a left-wing Democrat as president.

Barack Obama combines a high IQ with rare natural grace but to this day we still know little about his pre-political life. It is all hushed up and distorted because his buddies were a rogues galley of hard-left radicals. Obama has a similar worldview as Bernie Sanders but besides socialist healthcare, his presidency on the surface was reasonably centrist. He couldn’t get much through congress after his first two years but Obama said he would change America. He did so mostly out of public view via personnel change in the bureaucracy. The Obama Administration was tireless in seeding committed lefties into key positions. The long march through the institutions hit overdrive. This is why today the American military elite is weirdly Woke. The Left have an affinity for the public service and are at home in re-engineering and expanding its reach. Trump was handicapped from day one because the bureaucracy (including White House staff) were hell-bent on sabotaging him from within.

Vice Presidents are typically quite distant from the president. Dick Cheney, however, was more than Bush’s VP. Bush was unfamiliar with DC when elected but Cheney had been at the upper echelons since 1968. Cheney was arguably the most powerful VP in history. Cheney was also a hawk’s hawk and so he deserves at least an equal amount of blame as Bush for Iraq and its political aftermath.

When candidate Trump campaigned for the Republican nomination in 2015 and 2016 he openly derided Bush and Cheney over Iraq. He mocked them and made the primary voters laugh. The Bush and Cheney families despised this menace who was stealing their party before their eyes. In 2016 the Bush’s and Cheney’s almost certainly voted for Hillary Clinton. Not once during the Trump presidency could they find a word of encouragement for the president who, rather than start Middle East wars, was signing Middle East peace treaties. Bush and Cheney were likened to Hitler by Democrats a decade earlier, but that was all patched up due to the common enemy. The Bush’s and the Obama’s are close personal friends these days.

No member of the Bush family can get elected anywhere anymore so it fell to the single elected representative of Bush-Cheneyism to mount the last line of defence. Liz Cheney has represented the single House seat in Wyoming since 2016. She has been Trump’s highest profile Republican critic. She has dripping malice for Trump dressed up in high principle. She appears to be motivated by revenge against the man who corrected the errors of her dad and in the process de-platformed him in the party he once ran.

The Republican Party is currently in primary season. Trump-backed candidates have a success rate near 100 per cent. Today Liz Cheney added to that tally losing her primary by a mile to Trump-backed Harriet Hageman.

The loss of Liz Cheney is a good day for the Grand Old Party. No doubt she’ll now run into the arms of the Democrats. Good – they can have her and her family’s legacy.

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