Posted by
flagwaver on Friday, April 03, 2009 8:51:44 AM
History will decide where George W. Bush is ranked among the men who have served this wonderful state as President, and despite contary attempts it is much too early to make that decision. Passions on both sides are much too hot to get a true reading on what Bush did that worked or didn't work, and can't be looked at rationally; the Bush-bashers still claim he was Hitler and caused everything from rainy days and Mondays to the pimple on their foreheads. I would counter with something from fanatical Bush supporters, but in all honesty I haven't been able to find any. Most people who supported Bush still managed to have deep disagreements with him on many major issues, so their support is always tempered by opposition.
What I will do is call things like I see them, and as much as I liked Bush most of the time, his claim of being "the decider" was mostly a crock. Yes, he made the decisions on where to send troops and tried to set the agenda for fighting the wars we find ourselves in, but in too many areas Bush did not make tough decisions...he punted.
Take the situation with McCain-Feingold for example. This bill was unconstitutional on its face and everyone, including President Bush knew it. The idea that there should be limits on advertising and speach in favor of, or against a political candidate at any time in an election cycle was in stark contradiction to the First Amendment; Congress was doing just what the Constitution prohibited it from doing by passing a law that abridged the freedom of speech. The bill gets to Bush's desk...and he punts to the SCOTUS. Somehow he thought that the SCOTUS would get the bill before them and make the right decision, even though the Court was tilting left at the time. He had the veto pen in hand, yet used it to sign an unconstitutional piece of legislation in hopes of the SCOTUS making the decision that was rightfully his to make.
Look at the massive spending increases that came about in his tenure as President. While the American people could understand raises in the area of defense and homeland security in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, they were not prepared to see nondiscretionary spending balloon the way it did on the GOP's watch. The GOP had billed itself as a Party of lower taxes and fiscal restraint, yet they sent bloated budgets to the President nearly every year he was in office...and he punted. Instead of vetoing the bills and sendng them back to the Congress to be reworked, Bush signed everything that came across his desk and allowed the Congress to take the blame for the spending increases, in spite of the fact that he was in a position to rein that spending in with a stroke of his pen. But for usually political reasons, he allowed the spending to increase and managed to run up a huge deficit that was promptly hung around the necks of the GOP like the Ancient Mariner's albatross.
Finally, take a look at the current mess that we have economically. Bush and his administration set the ball rolling with the TARP plan to bail out struggling financial institutions, but failed to take the time to set up a system to properly track the money. But what was even worse than that, Bush punted on making any decisions on how the money he appropriated would be spent. He spent about half of the $700 billion in TARP funds and punted the decision on how to spend the rest to whatever administration followed his. And what have we gotten for it? Billions of dollars down various rat holes and an administration that uses the TARP funds as their entree to controlling the financial sector in the US economy, that's what!
George Bush may have been a lot of things, but a decider he was not. He was just like Ray Guy of the old Oakland Raiders; the greatest punter in the history of his profession.