With ex-President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy back in Crawford and Shotgun Dick Cheney being wheeled off to the Undisclosed Location/Republican Theme Park, we can now exhale.
Eight years of quite possibly The Worst President in recorded American history has come to an end with the feeble whimper that only cowardly bullies can issue when you beat their miserable asses with righteous anger. Americans stood up to the right-wing mouth-breathers and knuckle-draggers to put their mark in the proper place, getting a President with much potential to change things in a way that doesn’t benefit merely the rich, white, Republican, Base.
There are still a few things that have to be squared away now that Barack Obama has the keys to the joint. Herewith, the Punch List for Prez O:
Financial Meltdown: Christopher Cox and most of the SEC should be taken to the Rose Garden and given a sound thrashing. They knew Bernie Madoff was running a ponzi scheme as early as 1999. That Madoff was given a skate for eight years of the Bush administration was symptomatic of the attitude of the SEC under Bush, Cheney, Rove et al.
The Bush White House was the one that let investment banks out of the debt to equity rules in 2004 that led directly to the housing bubble. It wasn’t Clinton. It wasn’t a left-leaning pinko media elite, or a Democrat hobbled Congress. It was greed head Republicans doing their banker buddies a favour.
Troops on the Ground: It will take longer to unscrew this one. Dubya got his Mission Accomplished photo op and more than 4,000 American troops have been killed. Nobody knows how many Iraqis or Afghanis have been killed, but it’s more than 4,000. Add at least one zero, maybe two zeros to that 4,000 and we might be near the real number.
Under the War President, with all the fearsome technological and intelligence powers of the United States of America, they couldn’t find a six-foot-six bearded Saudi with failing kidneys somewhere in the upper corner of Pakistan. Why? Because they didn’t want to find him. Osama Bin Laden was the excuse to crank up a multi-Trillion dollar war budget that made money for The Base.
Saddam Hussein with his oddly-missing weapons of mass destruction was a cherry on the top of the money-tit sundae. Remember that the Iraq war and reconstruction was supposed to be self-funding from oil revenue? Oh yeah. Sorry about that.
Can we get that Congressional Medal of Freedom back from George Tennet and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Paul Bremer please?
Katrina and Ike: Parts of New Orleans are still in the third-world. Parts of the Gulf Coast around Houston are still in the third-world. Nobody has told the insurance companies and FEMA to get on with the job and get it fixed. You can’t blame this one on the left-leaning media bias or gridlock in Congress. This pile of flaming dog poop should be sent to Crawford, where it belongs.
Homeland Security? If it were possible to take a broken system, destroy it, then put something worse and even more unworkable back in place, then this is it. No more than 10 percent of cargo is actually screened, while people mill around in airports in their socks as Aunt Hazel’s walker is x-rayed until it glows. You can have as many packs of matches as you can carry, but don’t bring that Bic lighter.
Homeland Security was the biggest federal government reorganization since 1947 and it still looks like it was done on the back of an envelope. Hire some crack-heads in withdrawal, make them deliberately screw it up and you’ll still get a better system than Homeland Security. Who created it? Dubya and Tom Ridge under the guidance of Cheney and Rumsfeld to benefit their buddies selling technology to the paranoid.
The border fence with Mexico that would stop terrorists? It’s still in king-size Meccano parts in Brownsville because they can’t find enough unskilled labour to bolt it together.
No Child Left Behind? Let’s see how this worked. Sorry, you can’t actually read this posting, as you’re unable to read, because the funding for education was cut so drastically that teachers weren’t allowed to actually teach you. Perhaps you can sound out some of the words and glean an inkling of what I’m talking about.
Veteran’s Affairs. Oh let’s not go there. The cuts under Dubya will ensure that a new generation of homeless vets with deep, permanent incapacitating illnesses will walk the streets because there is no money to treat them and no facilities to treat them in. With luck only a few will go off the deep end with automatic weapons in a crowd or from a high building.
Perhaps the ailing vets can get some assistance from Faith-Based Groups. Oh yeah, that’s only for white, protestant, evangelical vets that have a lot of money to start with.
Foreign Relations: There is a reason Americans don’t like to go overseas on vacations. The locals laugh at them, at least when they’re not dodging aimed fire. Not only were Americans duped into voting for a frat-rat, draft-dodger, drunkard, daddy’s boy, illiterate, idiot, but they did it twice! No wonder the locals laugh and no wonder Americans stay home.
I can keep going for hours and hours, but you get the drift. Bush was by far, the worst, most venal, corrupt and misguided leader the United States ever had and I’m including Richard Nixon in that list. I’m actually glad, in some ways that Hunter Thompson is no longer with us. He would have had a massive stroke in the last few months of the Bush presidency and would now be babbling in his porridge.
Prez O has a very large mountain to climb. Prez O is starting well, shutting down Guantanamo Bay and insisting that the Army Field Manual interrogation techniques are as far as the US can go, which means waterboarding and Abu Ghirab will not happen again without some serious repercussions.
It will get better, but damn, he’s got a mountain to climb.
RoadDave 