If you're anything like me, you voted for Obama last Fall because you foolishly believed that he would quickly bring our troops home from Iraq, and more importantly, that he would charter a different bailout course than the crony capitalism of Paulson-Bush. I suspected that McCain & Palin were bailout socialists of the Bush-Paulson doctrine, and was proven right by this clip of Sarah waxing just plain stupid to Katie Couric. It doesn't get much more disgusting than that. Except, it does. Enter President Obama.
Though I expected tax increases and continued growth of government under Obama, 8 years of Bush had taught me that Republicans are fans of big government, too. Big fans. And I knew that McCain would be no different from Bush when it came to reigning in the public purse. In other words, there would be no reigning in, just surreptitious expansion while publicly delivering a small government message.
So, when you add (or subtract) the effect of putting Caribou Barbie on the ticket, and her 800-SAT cerebellum so close to the Presidency, it was an easy decision for me. Anyone but Palin, was my mantra. (In my defense, I was a supporter of Dr. Ron Paul, but like the rest of you I was forced to make a decision on a ticket that did not include him.)
However, we are now 8 months into Obama's term and it feels just like Bush. Our troops are still getting their limbs blown off daily by Iraqi IEDs--with no return date in sight. And in Afghanistan, Obama is considering a troop expansion. Our post 9/11 personal liberties remain under siege despite campaign promises to the contrary, and most egregiously, the bailouts have not stopped, and new tougher financial regulations are long-forgotten.
Who would have been worse, Phil Gramm or Larry Summers and Turbo Geithner? It's a freaking toss-up, with the only guarantee being that taxpayers would be the eventual losers.
In a choice between the stupid and the unknown, I took the latter, and now I'm the ignoramus.
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From James H (who discovered the article):
David Swanson, anti-war activist and co-founder of After Downing Street, has written an impressive piece describing a hypothetical third Bush term. But Swanson isn’t just playing with counterfactuals here. Everything he talks about, from wars to civil liberties to bailouts, is already happening, exactly as he describes it, except under President Obama.
From our perspective, this is a significant development. For the most part, the political Left has been deadly silent for the last seven months, but this blistering indictment from Swanson indicates that’s beginning to change. Most honest of all, he points out that when it comes to the bailouts and regulatory capture, the new boss is indeed same as the old boss.
- It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it....Can't you just picture it?
- There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.
- If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.
- In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed.
- Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.”
