And in some ways they'd be correct:
1) Bush set the standard for unbridled illegal immigration in order to give Walmart etc. a cheap exploitable labor force.
2) Bush bailed out rich, irresponsible liberal Democrat bankers in NYC at the expense of everyone else. This set the precedent for Obama's TARP II and GM bailout, which lost us Ohio.
3) Bush and Delay set us on the road to fiscal ruin by officially adopting the Democrat model of giving free stuff to people as a means of buying their votes, meaning we no longer had an anti-handout opposition in the entire country.
4) Bush set the standard for the rise of the American police state with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and the TSA. He did this to avoid the politically incorrect, but logically prudent policy of racial profiling.
In the end, Obama's fiscal and economic policies are nothing but a continuation of Bush's second term. The irony is that Obama ended up being "four more years of George Bush."
I don't understand TARP and now we will never know where that money went...but even Glenn Beck implied that it had to be done...
Untrue. If the banks had failed, there would have been NO loans to ANYONE for a long, long time.
Housing would have dived further, many more business would have failed for lack of credit.
What Bush did were LOANs, not bailouts and the TARP has mostly been paid back. What Obama did was bailouts.
Bush did all that, yeah, and damn him. But now perhaps the time is right for a wider perspective. If you’re gonna go back to 08, 04, 02, you gotta go back to the last guy and the last guy. The real tipping point was 1937. The states stopped mattering in 1865, and the electorate gave up in 36. SCOTUS was the last holdout, and caved in despite popular perception only after FDRs packing scheme failed. Why I’ll never know, but they handed the keys to the kingdom over, and the gates were open.
Then it was only a matter of time. How long could accumulated capital—physical, psychological, cultural, etc.—hold out against the more, more, more assumption of the basic functions of life by the central state? How much ruin could there br in the nation? Well, I have no idea, but I do know we’ll find out, because there’s no stopping the juggernaut. The so-called Reagan “revolution” rearranged slightly the deckchairs, no more.