After 9/11, Americans looked to President Bush and hoped for leadership. For a while, we put aside our deep reservations about the man and how he had stolen the presidency with the aid of Republicans on the US Supreme Court. For a while, we were one nation, ready to move as one to respond to the attacks and the threat they had revealed. For a while, Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences -- there was nothing we could not do.
It didn't last.
The President took advantage of the goodwill and solidarity of the American people and pushed hard for his partisan agenda. It was a chance to solidify Republican power, and he and Karl Rove went for it. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney used the opportunity to extend the powers of the president. And while the opportunity presented itself, they made plans to invade Iraq. They split the country deeply, embracing Karl Rove's basic principle of leveraging the president's base, and ignoring the rest of the country. The hardball partisanship stunk, but it worked for Bush -- until Katrina revealed the incompetence of his hackocracy and his Iraq war became a pointless, brutal and costly quagmire.
After 7 years, the stench is overpowering.
Maybe it is no surprise, then, that we find the message of Barack Obama so appealing.
Check this out, and tell me you don't believe we can roll back the crap of the past 7 years and start moving this country forward again. Oh, yes we can!
Neil
1 comment:
I cast a vote for Obama in the Georgia primary, but I'm really torn between the candidates. Obama talks a good game, but I think Clinton actually has the better policies and the will to fight for them. But Hillary is carrying around all that baggage from the past that the Repubs are going to dredge back up again (or they'll just make stuff up like they did for Kerry.)
I think they're both too centrist and won't give the country the real progressive changes it needs. I miss John Edwards and hope he has a role in whichever candidate's administration -- veep or attorney general would be nice.
I'll just be glad to see Bush and all his cronies gone. Then maybe we can do something about ending this stupid war and curbing global warming, two of our more pressing issues.
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