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jhymesba -> RE: A few kind words for President Bush (11/8/2008 8:35:44 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: celticlord2112
Real simple. Bad laws and bad resolutions can only be the result of Congress. The President has no official capacity to introduce any legislation in either the House or the Senate.
For every ill laid at the feet of President Bush, Congress had the power and presumptive duty to say "Yes" or "No".
If Bush's ideas were so horrible and so patently wrong, why did so many in Congress on both sides of the aisle go along with them? If Bush was so out of control as President, why did the Congress not use their legislative powers to rein him in?
Either Bush was not as bad as many would like to believe, or Congress indulged and even encouraged his excesses. Either way, the branch of our government most directly accountable to the people is not the President, but the Congress.
For six of Bush's 8 years, he had the backing of a Republican House and Republican Senate. During that time, he vetoed 1 bill, a stem-cell bill. Both the Iraq War and Afghanistan war were passed under a Republican administration. The current situation, caused by excessive inflation in food and energy prices combined with continued outsourcing of domestic labor, forcing people to either cut back on their budget or finance their life with loans (which many chose to do) resulted in a situation where reality caught up with the hype of housing refinance and the bottom fell out of the market. That inflation was caused by inflation in American dollars because we printed more to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of responsibly increasing taxes and encouraging Americans to fund the war through War bonds, much like how previous wars were financed. Combine that with the American Consumer's thirst for Chinese made cheap shit and American Government's thirst for Chinese loans, and China, already a big power, becomes much larger and starts consuming much larger amounts of energy, food, and other resources. Combine that with outsourcing our middle-end IT jobs and India starts getting more thirsty for oil and other stuff as well. The attack on Congress seems to be a back-door attack on the Democrats. OK, I'll give you that the Congress was at fault. The congress, for the 6 years that this was taking shape, and for the 6 previous years that Clinton was in office, was Republican. Therefore, I submit, it's the Republicans fault all this went down...at least mostly.
And all this can be pegged mostly on Republicans, though I do blame the Democrats for their share of it as well. However, in the blame game, 80% goes to the Rs, and 20% to the Ds, IMO.
Incidently, our way out of the quagmire we find ourselves in is the thing the Right screams the most about.
1) Increase taxes. The funding for the Iraq war has to come from somewhere. Let everyone pay their share, though if I were Obama, my BIGGEST source for Tax Dollars would be the Military/Industrial complex. "You want your war? Fine. Pay for it."
2) Punish companies who offshore. Reward those who employ American workers. Yes, I know. "Businesses should be encouraged to deliver a profit to their shareholders, nothing else." Balony, I say. You want to party in the American Consumer Market? Give something back.
3) Retain the 'Death Tax'. You want your children to make big bucks? Then teach them how to do it. No more of this 'giving my dollars to my kids' and having them turn out like Bush Jr., who ran two companies, a baseball team, AND a country into the ground.
4) Rework the system to punish failure again. "Too big to fail?" I think not. You take the risks, you suffer the consequences.
5) End the wars and curtail foreign involvement. Doubly so for the Arabians. Ending the war will cut our expenses by several billion a month! And if your population doesn't like us? Well, that's OK. We'll just cut you high and dry. Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it.
6) Develop alternatives to fossil fuels. That creates jobs locally which means more money in the American Economy, cuts out some of the old fluff (by forcing rich-cat CEOs of Oil companies to get on the ball or get Left Behind(tm)). The results of this development may well save our planet or push catastrophic change down the road until we can actually do something more about it.
My only 'kind words' for Bush are: "Don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya." Good ridance to bad rubbish, I say.
(And man, do I love that little animated smiley)
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