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DarkSteven -> RE: Why the GOP is unraveling. (5/12/2009 7:22:27 PM)
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The first step in changing yourself is to admit that you have a problem. The GOP still has not admitted that they have a problem, which is Bush's legacy.
The GOP has two standard answers right now.
1. Insist that Bush was right all along.
A. We have not had a terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. Proof that Bush's policy worked!
Easy to refute this one. 9/11 was the worst terrorist attack in history against the US, and it occurred on Bush's watch, after he gutted the agency that would have protected us per Clarke's testimony.
Also, Richard Reid made it through all governmental safeguards and would have taken out a plane except for the passengers and crew.
Also, Katrina showed that the DHS was not even rudimentally prepared to defend us if needed.
B. Waterboarding provided us with vital information that saved American lives.
The claim has been made but no proof offered as yet. Cheney has stated flatly that there are documents that prove the point, and that Obama should declassify them. I suspect that they do not exist.
The "evidence" that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were linked came from torture. Proof that you can torture people to get any information you want, true or not.
The fact that two men were waterboarded hundreds of times shows that it was not in fact used as a onetime method to get specific evidence, but done without a clue.
2. Pretend Bush and his policies never existed.
A. Jindal made a speech to counter Obama's. His radical economic proposal was... tax cuts!
It shoud be painfully obvious that cutting taxes while upping spending will balloon the deificit, and that it will have to be paid back eventually. That, plus lack of needed oversight, will be Bush's economic legacy.
B. Obama's spending will ruin us!
Uhhh... aren't you the same folks that didn't peep when Bush drove spending through the roof?
C. Obama's foreign policy will show that we're weak!
Bush managed over the course of eight years to trust Putin while he turned the clock back on Russia's liberalization, to prod Iran and North Korea to progress in nuclearization, to invade two countries in botched and now-bogged-down wars, to look the other way while Pakistan fostered radical Islam, to piss off almost all of Europe, and to watch Latin America begin to sway to Chavez' influence.
It's almost inconceivable that Obama could do worse.
When the GOP apologizes to the American people for the Bush administration's excesses and insanity, they will have begun to work past the legacy.
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