President Bush Quietly Exits; Obama Praised but has Done Nothing

Today is the last full day of the George W. Bush Presidency. If you turn on the news, you wouldn’t hear much about that. Instead, what you hear is how Barack Hussein Obama is going to save the country. You hear about how he’s Abraham Lincoln reincarnated, or that his words from his inauguration speech are going to be etched in stone.

If we remember back to when George W. Bush was about to be inaugurated, we didn’t hear this praise heaped on a man that had not yet done anything as we do with Obama. What we heard was an end to an era now that Bill Clinton was going to be gone.

In Bush’s campaign of 2000, he promised to be a uniter and not a divider. He said he could and would bring bi-partisanship back to Washington DC. It was a noble idea, but it had one flaw. No man can bring a Congress together that is so set in party division. For President Bush to be that uniter, he needed the cooperation of the Democrats. He didn’t get that and we knew he wouldn’t. What we didn’t know was the extent of that lack of cooperation.

This lack of cooperation began almost immediately. The dispute was in Florida. Al Gore wanted a recount in a few select counties. The courts were brought in. The Florida Supreme Court was brought in and after all of the recounts, and another recount desired by the Gore team, the United States Supreme Court finally put a stop to the process being repeated over and over. In each recount, George W. Bush won. However, it took 35 days to settle it.

That 35 days delayed the transition process that is needed for a smooth transition to a new administration. Furthering those problems, when Bush was sworn in, and his team took the White House, they discovered many items stolen by the Clinton’s including the W’s taken from the keyboards.

Within 7 ½ months of the Bush administration, five years of planning by Al Queda came to fruition on September 11, 2001 with their attack on New York, and Washington. We had been attacked 8 times during the Clinton administration and he treated it as a criminal matter. However, Bush had one attack in his first 7 ½ months in office and he took the fight to the terrorists on October 7, 2001. Less than 30 days following the attacks he started bombing Afghanistan. We have not been attacked since.

Bush had his tax cuts go through which stimulated the economy to a growth rate that hadn’t been seen in 25 years. The people paid a lower tax rate, yet the government was taking in record amounts of revenue.

Unfortunately, Congress passed budgets with increased spending and to President Bush’s discredit, he didn’t veto any of them. In 2004 President Bush was re-elected garnering over 50% of the vote which was the first time an election was decided with over 50% of the vote for the first time since his father had won in 1988.

In 2004 and 2005 President Bush warned of a coming economic collapse if we didn’t get a handle on regulating and correcting the credit markets, particularly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina was coming. President Bush declared the southeast, Louisiana in particular, a disaster area five days before the hurricane hit. On the Tuesday following the hurricane, the Democrat Governor of Louisiana said she needed 24 hours to decide whether she wanted the help that President Bush offered. The Democrat Mayor of New Orleans let 2,000 buses drown in the water rather than using them to save lives of those that couldn’t or wouldn’t get themselves out.

In 2006, the Democrats won the election and prepared to take over the Congress. In 2007 the economy began to collapse culminating in the emergency that happened in September 2008.

President Bush managed to unite the country at one point. Following the attacks on September 11, 2001 and it lasted until September 15, 2001. But then the Democrats returned to their old ways. The media decided it wasn’t a good idea (you decide the reason) to show the attacks that we saw on television.

There is no review of the past eight years by the media. They are all focused on Obama. President Bush hadn’t done anything yet prior to his election, yet people weren’t told that we had to give him a chance. In fact, the Democrats actually went to extremes the opposite way.

We don’t need to give Obama a chance. He’s gotten his chance by virtue of his election. Now it’s up to him to deliver. The press is heaping all of this praise on a man that has done nothing yet. With all of this praise for doing nothing, they have raised the bar for Obama. If he makes a mistake, it will be magnified to the American people. It won’t be to the press, they’ll make excuses for him. It will be seen by the American people however.

The Presidency is not about one man. It’s about an office and how it’s handled. No man is greater than what that office stands for. I am more worried about what the Democrats will do to the aura of the office of the President. We have a sizeable amount of the Clinton group coming back to the White House. We already know how the Clinton administration stripped the dignity from the Office of the President. It’s already begun with some of Obama’s choices. His Commerce Secretary had to withdraw due to a scandal in New Mexico. Hillary is the new Secretary of State and we’ll all be on pins and needles to see what sort of trouble she’ll be in or that her husband will cause. The treasury secretary has a tax problem which they (Obama and the press) are calling an “honest mistake”.

President George Bush leaves office making another great decision in Commuting the sentences of the two border guards. President-Elect Obama comes in, heaped in praise when the only thing he’s done so far is give us a peek that his administration will be scandal laden as was Clinton’s. I wonder why nobody has mentioned yet in the press that Sandy Berger has been working for Obama. Actually, I don’t have to wonder. The press doesn’t report any more. They have become part of the story.