Why Eric Pfeiffer is confused

In response to Time magazine's issue last week in which they ran Karl Rove's salute to Teddy Roosevelt, Eric Pfeiffer has an interesting bit of fluff in today's TNR, on Why Teddy Roosevelt would have hated Karl Rove. Sadly, he spends more time on hyperbole and misapplied comparisons than on actual historical analysis:

TR was intensely curious about the world. When he visited the still-under-construction Panama Canal in 1906, he became the first sitting president to visit a foreign land. Bush rarely ventured outside the country before 2000, and when he recently traveled to India he did not even visit the Taj Mahal.

Gosh, the POTUS didn't bother to visit the Taj Mahal! Isn't that just indicative of his refusal to open his mind via travel? But wait! There's this Associated Press complaint, from last year, over the POTUS' overuse of fuels:

But Bush is one of the nation's most-traveled presidents.

He has visited 46 countries, some of them several times, during his presidency. He has been to all states except Vermont and Rhode Island.

So far this year, he has made 73 domestic and foreign trips, including crisscrossing the country on a 60-day, 60-city tour to promote his Social Security plan. He was on the road Wednesday, speaking to a military audience in Idaho, before returning to his Texas ranch to resume his summer vacation.

So he missed seeing the Taj Mahal. OTOH, he did play cricket with a bunch of people of India. Hmmmm. Which will have more impact on international commerce and trust? Living people or old historic buildings? Which can tell him more about the culture of a region? People or buildings?*

Let us turn away from the AP twaddle and head back to the Pfeiffer whine:

On domestic politics, the two could not be more different. Roosevelt created the National Forest Service and preserved 16 million acres of trees with the stroke of a pen. He was close friends with Sierra Club founder John Muir and started his own conservation organization, the Boone and Crockett Club, in 1887. Bush, on the other hand, has accumulated a disastrous environmental record, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol and promoting drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. The two men similarly part ways on economics.

Yeah, that Dubya really hates nature. And that refusal to sign Kyoto, in much the same fashion as his predecessor and all of Congress just proves he's iggernant of planetary realities, unlike everybody on the left. Whereas Teddy made sure all of nature was to be left in its original, pristine condition, unspoiled by industry or other human need.

And (to the main point of Pfeiffer's thingy), as a result of Rove's being an ambitious S.O.B. who helped the planet-hating, stationary, moronic cowboy gain office via all the lawful channels available to him, obviously Teddy would deem him the lowest of the low.

Actually, he's probably right. Nobody much likes a self-made man who helps make others successful. It smacks of true communism.


*mind you, I like old buildings. I used to work in old buildings, in Williamsburg, VA, and have a lot of respect for what those walls represent. But if it were a clear choice between those old buildings and the future of a good people, I'm thinkin' bulldozers every time. people. people. people.