This is going to be my last post before George W. Bush leaves office, and with it I will retire my personal countdown that I've been running at the end of each post since before I was blogging at Blogger.
George W. Bush has been the most disastrous President in American history, leading an unprecedented assault on the American Constitution, on regulation of the economy, and on progressive taxation. He has ripped to shreds whatever remnants of credibility the United States had on the world stage, and has turned the entire Muslim world vehemently against citizens of Western nations. He has turned a projected 10 year surplus of $5.6 trillion into a projected 10 year deficit of $10 trillion, a $15.6 trillion swing in eight years. His reckless lack of regulation has killed Americans through tainted food (and through regulatory harmonization efforts has dragged down similar standards in Canada and Mexico), led to a collapse of capitalism parallelled only by the Great Depression, and privatized enormous swathes of formerly public services.
George W. Bush also invaded and occupied two countries, supported brutal dictators in a dozen others and dramatically worsened the AIDS crisis through mandating abstinence only education to get access to US money.
While Obama will not fix all of these problems, he seems to intend to take a swing at most of them. And that will be a refreshing change.
Goodbye, Mr. Bush. It's been depressing.
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There's no red text at the bottom of your post. It must be a new day.
ReplyDeleteYay, now you can whine for the next four or eight years about Obama not being the second-coming of Marx.
ReplyDeleteTo anonymous: I may well criticize Obama's policies from the left, in fact that is something you can take pretty well for certain. He is not a socialist, or even a social democrat in the European or even Canadian mould. He is a Keynesian liberal, to the left of Bill Clinton and to the right of about half of the Liberal Party of Canada. And he is far to the right of me, something that I have never hidden.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to complain that he isn't the second coming of Marx, because if you read more of my blog you would see that I never saw him as any kind of saviour. He is a constitutionalist, and he is able to coherently string syllables and words together, which is more than the last president could manage, and he thinks that government is not a four letter word. But he is what he is, and what he is a capitalist, who wants to sand down the rough edges of capitalism a little.
To Devin: it felt very odd finishing a post without putting in that red text. I have a feeling I'm going to have to keep fighting the muscle memory for a while.