Grow Up, America!
This is an excerpt, the full article can be accessed on the link above.
Bush not only initiated two trillion-dollar wars, he cut taxes and expanded domestic spending; a prescription drug benefit was the cherry on his welfare-state sundae. Obama, more leery of the Middle East fantasy but more enamored of government programs and deficit finance, called Bush’s profligacy and raised him a few trillion. Back when Roosevelt was cranking up the welfare state, his advisers told him the pay-as-you-go structure of the Social Security program would eventually bankrupt it. FDR was insouciant; that outcome was several generations down the road. The time horizon has shrunk; the fiscal wolves are at the door. You get the feeling that Obama just wants to play golf and avoid calamity until the day after he leaves office. He’s the kid who hasn’t read his assignment and hopes the bell will ring before the teacher calls on him.
Bush not only initiated two trillion-dollar wars, he cut taxes and expanded domestic spending; a prescription drug benefit was the cherry on his welfare-state sundae. Obama, more leery of the Middle East fantasy but more enamored of government programs and deficit finance, called Bush’s profligacy and raised him a few trillion. Back when Roosevelt was cranking up the welfare state, his advisers told him the pay-as-you-go structure of the Social Security program would eventually bankrupt it. FDR was insouciant; that outcome was several generations down the road. The time horizon has shrunk; the fiscal wolves are at the door. You get the feeling that Obama just wants to play golf and avoid calamity until the day after he leaves office. He’s the kid who hasn’t read his assignment and hopes the bell will ring before the teacher calls on him.
boy lets hope Hillary Isn't elected.
I've met him a few times. He is all that is evil in a politician. I detest that man.
I supported Obama from the primaries, but I remember liking that element of McCain putting the crisis in perspective. President Obama was supposed to be about "hope", but I did not like the amount of *fear* we got once he was elected. He warned the country that the economic crisis would be very scary, but I wonder the gov't had done very little and let companies fail if things would have been just fine, except for people who made risky decisions and those around them. I wanted more hope and optimism.
HE DID NO SUCH THING.
There was only ONE war, with THREE theaters:
Afghanistan
Iraq
United States
We didn't call WWII "two wars", even though it was fought in 2 theaters (Europe and Pacific).
I'm in no way interested in defending Bush, but let's keep the facts straight.
It'd be easier to tell that it was a multi-theater war if instead of searching grandma on planes, we banned Arab moslems from flying into the U.S.
It'd be easier to tell that it was multi-theater war if we had conquered the territories we'd invaded, appointed American governors-general, and used them as staging ground for expansion of the war, as we did in WWII.
That Bush botched the war effort doesn't change the fact that invading the middle east was pretty much mandatory, and still is.
And, Bush didn't "initiate" anything; the jihadis initiated this war, long before Bush was ever in office.
I don't think Vietnam was shoved down the memory hole, however. I think the powers that be stood back in awe that the financing mechanism apparently "worked", and it emboldened them to try it the next time they got into a scrape, and then it simply became standard operating procedure.
I have some sympathy for Hiraghm's challenge to you that Bush did not really initiate two wars. I think the facts show Al Qaeda was attacking us through the 90s (I won't list all the attacks here, but they are numerous). The Sept 11 attacks provoked us into a more traditional war response. I do think Iraq developed into a second theatre of the same war too, but that was a war of our making. I think we could have invaded any other middle eastern country and the result would have been the same: Al Qaeda would have said "America is on Islam lands" and they would have engaged us there. If we had stayed out of Iraq, we could have kept the focus in Afghanistan and I do think we strategically blundered here because I think some of the powers that be did not actually have the goal of eliminating Bin Laden, but instead figured they could take advantage of our mobilization in the area to achieve some other goals, under the dubious CLAIM they were Al Qaeda related.