The Gray wrote:avwolf wrote:It's true that Obama inherited the problems that I tend to think are largely responsible for the current economic situation in the US, but Bush wasn't responsible for most of them either, they largely predated his presidency too.
Not to step on your toes, but I don't think you can generalize that so strongly. Didn't the U.S. under the Clinton administration enjoy historical record-high surpluses and record-low poverty rates, but also the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged? And all that after the preceding Bush administration let the middle class heavily suffer?
Oh, I can generalize pretty widely. Presidents inherit most of the economy, and an individual President's policies often have far-reaching consequences that are not immediately apparent. On top of that, culture and spending behaviors don't necessarily rely on the President's policies to drive the economy. I tend to view the housing crisis, which led directly to the credit crunch, as being the foremost cause of the economic adjustment we're seeing here. Bush inherited sub-prime lending, and the Democrats generally opposed examining the massive organizations responsible for malfeasance. Bush didn't operate with his own party controlling Congress for most of his Presidency the way Obama has. In fact, a great deal of the criticism President Bush received from Republican registered voters during his tenure was that he acted in too bipartisan a manner and compromised on too many policies. *shrug* It's true, Bush spent a lot of the surplus in stimulus funds, but if we're going to criticize Presidents for that, at least Bush
had a surplus to spend. And being an across the board stimulus, it's not like he was counting on trickle-down to drive the economy, he was counting on consumer spending, the thing that drives our economy, to drive our economy more. Unfortunately, culture and policy had already been trending toward a borrowing-happy consumer culture that simply wasn't sustainable. I'm pretty sure that goes far beyond any single President.
The criticism Obama has faced isn't so much that he caused the economic downturn, it's that he doesn't seem to care very much. His personal focus (what little there is, because he rarely suggests bills to Congress) tends to be on policies that increase spending (something the American people are currently nervous about) rather than on decreasing spending or focusing on job creation (which polls have, time and time again, wished the President would bother commenting about). The stimulus was a nice try on his part. It didn't work, and he should have quit trying to sell it to people after it was clear that it wasn't helping the way he claimed it would, and the content of the stimulus package was pretty "pork"-laden (though that should be considered a criticism of the American government in general and not the President or his administration in particular), but it's hard to personally criticize Obama for that. His focus on the Healthcare bill tends to get criticism, because, at the time, Americans didn't give a damn, it only looks like it's going to cost us money, and, most damning of all, "we need to pass it before we can see what's in it." (Old news, I know, but we're debating George Bush, Sr., Clinton, and George W., so it's not the oldest news to mention.) Since it has become law, more and more sections have come out which are...unattractive and/or unnecessary. It steams my cheese in particular because it's going to be forcing Americans to purchase health insurance at a time when many, many Americans are in less of a position to be capable of purchasing it. (And this is coming from a Nebraskan, where unemployment rose so high, it'd be considered a healthy national average in a year of economic growth, and our public power utilities are the poster children of how government regulated industry can be better than private industry answers. Seriously, why nobody tried to compare government-sponsored health insurance to Nebraska's ultra-low cost public power utilities is a mystery to me.)
The Gray wrote:How the Obama administration should have been supposed to tidy up all this neglect defies me, especially since one would have to get past several senate subcommittees controlled by the opposition.
It would have been nice to see him
try. Democrats have held majorities in both houses of Congress for his entire Presidency. He's had unfettered and unprecedented direct access to the American people. Even if bills were held up in committee, he could have taken one of his many, many addresses to make a case for the bill. Instead, he's rarely bothered to do anything but promise to change Bush policies and then never follow through, or make excuses as to why changing those policies just isn't possible at this time, even though he'd claimed it'd be a priority.
The Gray wrote:Exactly, the same guys that celebrated America's financial crises and act racist against their frikkin President just because he's black.
Like Windwaker said, an idiot with a sign (or even many idiots) does not necessarily mark the policies supported by the non-idiots around them as invalid or completely unworthy of consideration. If that were the case, Bush should have pretty much been able to do whatever he wanted unopposed, judging by the sheer number of stupid signs attesting that he was a Nazi in the pocket of the Jews and similar poorly articulated but incomprehensibly idiotic statements. The real Tea Party statements tend to be based on a desire for fiscal responsibility in the government, not an unreasonable thing to request. For that, they've been vilified more than the protestors of Bush's policies, to the point of having a derogatory, sexual slur nickname attached to them which the media incessantly parrots.
That bothers me much more than the occasional birther, truther, or other idiot with a sign in any given political protest.
The Gray wrote:Another question that I have to ask as a rational being is why you still support an administration that almost entirely consisted of business friends from the oil industry and that presented faked evidence of WMDs before the frikkin UN and a baloney correlation between Bin Laden and Hussein to justify the invasion of Iraq in what many independent sources now consider a gambit to take control of oil and gas resources and entirely motivated by greed than an obligation to protect the American populace from their enemies?
Nonsense argument, Gray, I'm disappointed. Every intelligence agency in the world believed Iraq was in control of WMDs (including Iraq's own), it wasn't until after the boots hit the ground in the war that we learned the situation was different. And if this was a gambit to control oil and gas resources, it's a damn poor one, since we didn't manage any of that happening, now did we? Besides, Congress, which at the time was pretty bipartisan,
authorized the use of military forces in Iraq for a laundry list of causes, most of which were casus belli dating from the Clinton administration. You are welcome to argue that you do not believe we were justified in our military action (though Congress disagreed), or that the military action was poorly managed, or that we "declared victory too early" (the ridiculous "Mission Accomplished" thing making that a pretty valid complaint), or that we didn't fight the right kind of war for the war we got involved in, but arguing that we were lied to or went into this blind is not a particularly defensible position. Might as well argue that Bush was an idiot, if you want to throw easily disproven political mud around.
Besides, at least Bush had the decency to request authorization from Congress, and receive it. President Obama's military actions in Libya lacked such authorization, making it more fitting the term "illegal war" than Iraq ever was. (Not that I personally disagree with the President sending military assets to Libya, I just wish he'd gotten Congress to give him the thumb's up first -- Presidents are well known for disliking that rule and generally pushing as hard as they can against it, but they do generally comply, if grudgingly).
If you'd like to criticize Bush for having an administration consisting of business friends, then it's entirely appropriate to criticize Obama for having an administration consisting of friends from Chicago's political machine. The fact of the matter is that, regardless of the supposed corruption of Bush's "cronies," it's Obama's that are actually being forced to resign after embarrassing scandals come to light. Bush's friends might have been oil barons, but in terms of people who reflect well on the President, he did a much better job of picking his friends than President Obama has thus far.
So why would a rational being support an administration consisting almost entirely of spendthrift political figures from one of the most corrupt political landscapes in America?
Really, it's easy -- we pick and choose the people who best suit our policies, even if they don't match our own personal policies precisely. Additionally, our own biases color our views: I for one find Obama impossible to listen to because his public speaking style offends me, for instance, which makes it harder for me to see the good in his policies. President Bush wasn't perfect, but I appreciated many of his policies, especially his foreign policy. And, maybe, in the end, I'd rather have
"smaller government for rich people than bigger government for everybody." 
-- Edit --
A bit off the topic of Obama specifically, but the Tea Parties' signage is particularly interesting because there's been honest attempts to "infiltrate" Tea Party events with offensive signs so that the media would see these offensive signs and attribute them to the actual Tea Party protesters. I'm not aware of that being a common counter-protest tactic for most previous political protests. The sign in question might well be real though -- the infiltrators that I've seen photos of didn't really get the point of infiltrating, and their signage was largely very obviously nonsensical or not part of the Tea Party agenda. It's still crazy, but it might be authentically crazy instead of fake crazy. But if you ever see a guy holding an upside-down sign that says, "This is a sign," just know that he isn't actually a Tea Party protester.
