Last Best Hope : Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise

by Scarborough, Joe

• ISBN13: 9780307463692
• ISBN10: 0307463699
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-09
• Publisher: Crown Forum

Summary

In this groundbreaking book, Joe Scarborough tells Republican Party bosses what they don't want to hear, explains why Democrats are making matters so much worse, and then shows leaders of both parties the way forward.

Author Biography

JOE SCARBOROUGH is currently the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and can be heard weekdays on The Joe Scarborough Show. He was elected to Congress in 1994, becoming the first Republican to represent northwest Florida since 1873, and was reelected three times with no serious opposition. In 2001, he retired from Congress and, in 2003, became an NBC political commentator and host. He is also the author of Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Way Back	p. 1
Increasing Military Power Through Restraint	p. 25
Avoiding an Earthly Hell
The Great American Bailout	p. 65
In the Age of Idiots
From Mean to Green	p. 99
Why Conservatives Should Conserve
We Are All Socialists Now	p. 125
Je Prendai La Meme Chose Que Pierre
Social Conservatism in the Twenty-first Century	p. 151
Money Can't Buy Me Love	p. 173
But It Can Rent the White House for Four Years
Death by Entitlement	p. 201
It's Not About Ideology. It's About Math
What Republicanism Hath Wrought	p. 227
How Choosing Power over Principle Cost Conservatives Both
The Gipper's Greatest Lesson	p. 253
Bringing Grace to a Blood Sport
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1Increasing military power through restraint

Avoiding an Earthly Hell

We must be judicious in our use of the military. We will fight only when it is in the vital interests of the United States, when our mission is clear, and when the exit strategy is obvious.

—Governor George W. Bush

The morning after George W. Bush made his farewell address to the nation, few media outlets took note of it. In fact, the only national paper to mention the 43rd president’s final speech on its front page was USA Today, and it confined the story to a small box that described another article hidden inside.

America’s newspapers were focused instead that morning on an airplane that had been taken down from the skies over Manhattan.

TV crews dutifully rushed to the crash site and almost immediately began warning Americans of a grave new danger that would threaten the safety of air travelers for years to come.

Tom Costello of NBC News told Morning Joe viewers that government officials were working furiously to address the problem and that the crisis had become so grave in the nation’s capital that cannons were being fired from the end of Reagan National Airport’s runways every three minutes.

The Times of London weighed in the next morning with a list of solutions government officials were considering to protect British passengers from this growing menace. The Times reported that some leaders had become so desperate that they were resorting to clandestine poisoning, dog attacks, and advanced radar technology.

Coincidentally, a few days earlier the U.S. government had released a report showing that for the first time in aviation history, the United States had gone two years without suffering a single casualty on a commercial air carrier. So just when Americans thought it was safe to once again climb aboard a plane without fear of attack, their confidence was jolted by a rising threat that now stalked the not-so-friendly skies.

We had again met our enemy in the air over New York City, and what was it?

Birds.

As Tom Costello helpfully explained to viewers, the Canada goose population was on the migratory rise and its effect was being felt on runways across America. That phenomenon had ended in the miraculous water landing on the Hudson River of a US Airways flight.

How ironic it must have seemed to the man who saw his presidency defined by four plane crashes within an hour’s time that his farewell address to America was eclipsed by yet another plane crash in Manhattan. He must have felt some pride in the fact that the culprits seven years later were not a group of terrorists intent on destroying our way of life, but instead a group of birds trying to avoid a very loud object flying their way.

Predictably, few in the media noted the difference George W. Bush’s presidency had made to the safety of Americans from a terrorist attack. And while debates might rage for years to come over his approval of harsh interrogation techniques or how long enemy combatants could be locked up, those battles will be waged in law schools like Columbia and NYU, instead of inside the concourses of LaGuardia or JFK.

George W. Bush had made the protection of American citizens and the prevention of future terror attacks on U.S. soil his top priority. By that measure—the most important many apply to a commander in chief—the 43rd president did what few Americans thought possible in the weeks following September 11.

He kept Americans safe at home.

While President Bush accomplished that task, conservatives now must assess the cost of achieving that goal and determine how America’s actions over the past eight years have impacted their movement and, more important, U.S. foreign policy for the next generation.

Before discussing the most effective conservative approach to foreign policy in the future, we sh

---

Excerpted from The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise by Joe Scarborough
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.