Posted on 06/08/2011 4:34:03 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama ran more against lame-duck President Bush than against his Republican opponent, John McCain. The campaign is now long over, and yet President Obama still seems haunted by the ghost of his predecessor. Last week, for example, he was railing at the Bush phantom, whom he blamed for his received economic mess. In the world of Barack Obama everything he inherited was someone else’s fault — unless he believes past policies offer him some advantage and thus are to be claimed as entirely his own.
The stock market is sliding. Gas and food prices are soaring. The housing market is as bad as it has been for the last three years. Unemployment is back over 9 percent. Economic growth is anemic. The national debt has risen $5 trillion in just three years. This year’s $1.6 trillion budget deficit is not stimulating anything but uncertainty and despair. Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable at present rates of payouts. Record numbers of Americans draw food stamps and unemployment insurance. An unpopular Obamacare has not even been implemented yet, and the administration has already granted 1,400 exemptions from it.
In other words, much as Jimmy Carter took the hard times of 1975–76 and turned them into the mess of high interest, high inflation, high unemployment, and high gas prices — while blaming the American people for their malaise — so too Barack Obama has made almost everything worse and is getting angrier at other people and events (the European meltdown, the Japanese tsunami, the Middle Eastern unrest) in the process.
The administration’s massive borrowing, new regulations, promised higher taxes, opposition to new oil leases and pipelines, takeovers (from GM and Chrysler to health care), and rhetorical assault on the successful in private enterprise have turned a bottoming-out recession into a near-permanent slump. Those with capital do not want to invest in new workers or equipment because they believe the president does not like them, in the sense that he will raise taxes to take away their hard-won profits, or will impose some sort of new regulation — like Obamacare or prohibitions against opening factories in right-to-work states — to make profits impossible. The result is that they have been for two years largely sitting out this “recovery,” as the economic witch-doctors — Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers — come and go.
Meanwhile, Obama serially faults the Bush policies of 2008, not his own of 2009–11 — something that becomes ever more difficult as the Bush administration’s average unemployment rate, GDP growth, deficits, and gas prices now seem not all that bad. And to the degree that economists fault Bush for the financial meltdown of 2008, they have cited his excessive federal spending, government intrusion into the housing market, and chronic budget deficits — just those areas where Obama has trumped Bush and turned his misdemeanors into felonies.
Sometimes Obama’s obsession with Bush’s ghost is more implicit. Take national security. He has quite boldly embraced and expanded all the Bush protocols he once trashed, largely because he has discovered that Guantanamo, tribunals, renditions, preventive detention, the Patriot Act, and Predator drones keep terrorists away from the United States. Yet to this day, Obama has not told the American people why renditions used to be bad and are now acceptable, or why the Bush Predator-drone program of targeted assassinations was wrong but needed to be quintupled. Instead, he makes it clear that a President Obama would have absolutely no patience with someone like a griping Senator Obama.
Obama has not changed the Bush-Petraeus plan for Iraq — but has never explained why he once denounced what he now advocates. Now the president has dropped his former multicultural reaching-out to the theocracy in Iran and the dictatorship in Syria. But again, what caused the reversion to the Bush-era distrust of these awful regimes? Has Obama matured in other areas, in the fashion that he recently confessed that his opposition to raising the debt ceiling in 2006 was the sort of irresponsible politicking that he now deplores in others?
When George Bush was president, promoting democracy was derided as an arrogant neoconservative imposition of our values onto different cultures. Now pushing democracy in the Arab world is called advocacy for human rights. Yet once more, Obama never explains why he channels the prior president’s policies without even the barest reference to his name.
Obama knows the media are invested in his success. Therefore he feels no urgency to explain to the public why policies enacted years ago deserve blame for their failures and receive no praise for their successes. It is almost as if Obama on some days claims, “Bush did it,” while on others insisting, “Bush didn’t do it.”
The young president, you see, cannot help it. He is haunted by the ghost of a president past.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
Very good.
McCain ran against himself more than he ever 'ran against Obama'.
I got two turds here. Which one do you want to eat?
Those with capital do not want to invest in new workers or equipment because they believe the president does not like them, in the sense that he will raise taxes to take away their hard-won profits, or will impose some sort of new regulation — like Obamacare or prohibitions against opening factories in right-to-work states — to make profits impossible. The result is that they have been for two years largely sitting out this “recovery...”
Who is John Galt?
I agree - these words say a lot! The Obama Presidency reminds me a lot of when Kucinich was mayor of Cleveland (he eventually drove Cleveland into bankruptcy). He bad-mouthed businesses left and right. He played the class warfare card over and over. And the result was predictable - large corporations moved their headquarters out of Cleveland. Some chose nearby suburbs like Independence or Richmond Heights, while others left the area completely. The net result was that people with money took their money elsewhere, and Cleveland as a whole suffered greatly. Jobs left, along with their tax dollars, leaving the city in worse shape.
Obama's doing the same thing to the US. Like all democRATS, he's effectively biting the many hands that feed him. It is backfiring, just as it did in Cleveland.
WE ARE ... JOHN GALT!
I bought multiple copies of Atlas Shrugged in November 2008 and gave away as gifts.
This morning Joe Scarbouro had a depiction of what happened to the Obama/Pelosi stimulus that was more familiar to me than the standard Republican depiction. This is what I remember:
Obama originally proposed a stimulus plan in late 2008 early 2009 that wasnt particularly good but sounded reasonable to your average voter. For example he had tax credits for employers that hire people (it was not enough to do much) and he proposed inferstucture spending on roads and bridges as well as the individual tax credits that he called tax cuts . This was probably the plan Trump supported.
Pelosi and the other progressives in the House pretty much threw away Obama’s proposal and replaced it with a huge welfare and public sector union payback bill with most money going to food stamps, unemployment compensation and medicaid and welfare programs and teachers unions, they kept the idea of the Obama tax credits, much of which went to those that pay no taxes.
Obama was pretty much stuck there, three RINOs in the Senate voted for it in return for some cuts in the proposed spending. So Obama got a bill to sign, congressional Democrats were rushed to vote for it without knowing exactly what was in it. A huge welfare union payback bill was sold by Obama as a jobs bill that he later had to depict as bringing us back from the brink when the bill he now owned failed, as it had to. And Boehner went on TV show after TV show each week saying:"Americans want to know, where are the jobs?" It was the perfect line.
“Obama never explains why he channels the prior president’s policies without even the barest reference to his name.”
Obama’s never gonna hafta explain much of anything to the American people; the dewy-eyed print-and-TV press protects him, and his voters, women, minorities, homolesbos, unions, and elitist coastal academic/chatterer liberals aren’t bright enough to even notice their precious secular messiah’s failures or contradictions.
Does the next Republican President get to blame Obama for four years?
“Bush Did It” bump for later.............
Gotta agree with you. No matter who had been in the Presidential office before the 2008 election, John McCain was a loser. The one and only good thing about Obama is that he is pushing through all of his unpopular policies with a “D” behind his name. John Mccain would still be “reaching out to our friends across the aisle” and doing many of the same things Obama is doing - all with an “R” behind his name. The only difference is that the “R’s who generally turn out for elections saw McCain for what he was and refused to vote for him. Obama’s so-called majority win existed largely because there were many who refused to vote for either of them and stayed home - thus making it possible for the libs to decide the election.
I can’t condemn Obama on the basis of that picture because I have done the same thing myself as a favor to my wife but I have also done an awful lot of what Reagan and Bush are doing in those pictures. I can find plenty of other reasons to condemn him though;>)
All this is why I am likely to make a pretzel out of the next fool who spouts off to me about how Obama is “better then Bush”. I don’t care how bad anyone thinks George W. Bush or his father was as president, a person has to be an idiot to think Obama is better in any way whatsoever.
Indeed.
Or you can get raw with these strings. Either way, the violin is sweet yet lethal.
Do it!
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