Still more confidence in this president than I ever had the dogmatoid arthritic who preceded him
Because the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit and No Child Left Behind adhered so closely to conservative dogma?
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was practically designed to feed purveyors of standardized tests. It pushed teachers and school administrators to meet the demands of tests at the expense of other teaching activities -- anything other than the Three Rs. Such came at the cost of such essentials as science, history, civics, and the arts. You know science, right? That's how we solve lots of problems. History is how we make sense of events. Civics tells us the norms of government (norms that Bush, Cheney, Rove, Abramoff, and deLay mocked to the detiment of good practice). The arts establish that more exists to life than crude acquisitiveness.
The Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit forced the government to pay top dollar for prescription medications, clearly something that only a corporate stooge would promote.
I wasn't arguing the merits of either program. I was merely bringing forth examples to debunk the myth that George W. Bush was some sort of dogmatic conservative.
Bush was able to lead? Where was he when the economy began falling off a cliff in 2007?
He signed a ridiculous "stimulus" bill. When the sh**t really hit the fan, he signed the EESA
against the will of his own party. Oh, and he did this with a Congress in opposition. While he may have made bad decisions, you can't say he wasn't able to lead.
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Whatever deficiencies Obama may have as a leader, his deficiencies are nothing contrasted to those of Dubya. Dubya was a pathological liar and a puppet of those who gave him his campaign funds. As for the stimulus bill, such came at the behest of his buddies in the financial industry, people who themselves created the problem and got scared of consequences of failure that might include mass revolt that might happen under his successor. To them it mattered far less who would be President then than that there be no threat of revolution. Choose your metaphor for the consequences: the financiers culpable for the subprime lending/real-estate bubble meltdown would be among the first to go to the wall before the firing squad (as in Castro's Cuba) or be led to the guillotine (French Revolution). At the least the would be dispossessed like aristocrats in Lenin's Bolshevik Russia... it was the financiers who were scared. Add to that, much of the give-away was to foreign investors -- like capitalists in China -- who insisted on a return of the investment that the Bush maladministration pushed upon them. Those who rip off foreign lenders are in deep trouble; they make it good or they take others down with themselves. You didn't expect Chinese lenders to let us off the hook for our follies, did you? Don't you think that they would have ways in which to overthrow those who ripped them off?
As for economic management, Dubya stood for the most hare-brained of policies possible: rewarding tycoons and executives for gutting a nation's manufacturing with tax cuts while promoting speculation in real estate as an anodyne. Except that the object of speculation in the 1920s was more in corporate securities than in real estate, Dubya's economic policies were out of the Harding/Coolidge playbook whence came the disaster that Herbert Hoover couldn't undo.
Dubya had one virtue as a politician: he was loyal to those who raised him into the formality of power. He never contradicted them and never showed any resistance to their most hare-brained and myopic schemes. When his handlers got scared, he did what they told him to do. That stimulus bill arose when financiers got scared of images of people like them losing their class privilege, if not their lives.
The best evidence that Dubya was a disaster was that the GOP used his image as sparingly as possible -- and the Democrats exploited contempt of his egregious failures as much as possible. Dubya took the trust that others had developed in America and trashed it.
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Again, I don't mean to disregard your well-written and obiously well-thought out post, but my aim wasn't to justify Dubya's record as President. I was countering Mr. Phips' statement that Dubya wasn't a leader. He may not have led us in the best possible direction, but he was most certainly a leader.
