Bush wasn’t so bad after all, according to Obama
By Steve_in_KC on January 18, 2009 at 11:35 AM in Current Affairs
If there’s one thing you can count on from Obama, it’s that he will try to please everyone, and end up pleasing nobody. This guy has some kind of psychological problem. He will “say anything” to try to garner favor. He’s the Eddie Haskell of politics.
He will also do everything he can to avoid being blamed for anything. After running against Bush and the Neocon policies for two years, he suddenly finds himself in the position of having to decide whether his campaign rhetoric was just talk or a real plan for action.
Consider Obama’s primary beefs and campaign promises:
- He ran against Hillary Clinton with the constant complaint that she voted for the war in Iraq, and blamed her and Bush and McCain for wanting the war to continue to a logical conclusion, while he would end it within a few months if he were to be elected president. Now he doesn’t want to rush into anything.
- He railed against torture in all forms, water-boarding, stress positions, and depriving political prisoners of sleep. I think the reason he made sure he was photographed “body surfing” in Hawaii was so that nobody would have him on film with a surfboard, which is a form of water-boarding.
- He was against invasions of the privacy of Americans through wiretapping and records searches, you know, like that FISA bill he threatened to filibuster, only to break with the Democratic majority and vote FOR the bill.
- He criticized Bush for being unwilling to sit down and chew the fat with ruthless regimes, claiming he would talk with any world leader unconditionally. Now he has ground rules and bottom lines.
In other words, Bush did everything wrong, and Obama promised to change everything and make the world right again. Sunshine, lollipops, roses, rainbows, and flying unicorns for everybody!
HAH!
Now that he’s about to be handed the reins of power, his hands are shaking! He’s like, “Oh shit, what do I do now?!?”
So he’s decided to do what he always does. He’s going to do nothing. He doesn’t want to rock the boat. No major changes until he has had a chance to see the big picture and learn from the experts, like George Bush and Dick Cheney.
SusanUnPC sent me an article by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post. The title of the article is “Exit Bush, Shoes Flying.”
In it, he talks about Bush’s legacy, and has some hilariously insightful comments:
Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman’s rehabilitation took decades. Bush’s will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama.
Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds — the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition. It’s not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It’s the continuity of policy.
It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned.
It is the great care Obama is taking in not preemptively abandoning the anti-terror infrastructure that the Bush administration leaves behind. While still a candidate, Obama voted for the expanded presidential wiretapping (FISA) powers that Bush had fervently pursued. And while Obama opposes waterboarding (already banned, by the way, by Bush’s CIA in 2006), he declined George Stephanopoulos’s invitation (on ABC’s “This Week”) to outlaw all interrogation not permitted by the Army Field Manual. Explained Obama: “Dick Cheney’s advice was good, which is let’s make sure we know everything that’s being done,” i.e., before throwing out methods simply because Obama campaigned against them.
Looks like Obama is kind of back-tracking on his campaign promises! I’m shocked! Who could ever have foreseen such a thing? I mean except PUMAs, Republican strategists who helped eliminate Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and anyone else not hypnotized by Obamamania.
Krauthammer continues:
Obama still disagrees with Cheney’s view of the acceptability of some of these techniques. But citing as sage the advice offered by “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history” (according to Joe Biden) — advice paraphrased by Obama as “we shouldn’t be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric” — is a startlingly early sign of a newly respectful consideration of the Bush-Cheney legacy.
Not from any change of heart. But from simple reality. The beauty of democratic rotations of power is that when the opposition takes office, cheap criticism and calumny will no longer do. The Democrats now own Iraq. They own the war on al-Qaeda. And they own the panoply of anti-terror measures with which the Bush administration kept us safe these past seven years.
Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls “campaign rhetoric” and the policy choices he must make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek — Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney — has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek’s neck-snapping cover declares, “Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney’s Vision of Power.”
So Obama now thinks old Dick Cheney may have a little bit of wisdom worth pondering. And maybe this whole War on Terror thing has a tinge of reality to it, if you really think about it.
Now let me get this out there and I want to be clear about it: I’m no fan of Bush & Cheney, but I do have a certain respect for those who know waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy more about world affairs than I do. I wouldn’t presume to say they were out-and-out wrong in everything about their world view or their choices in how to manage the War on Terror. But then, I didn’t run for high office claiming that these people were all wrong and that I had all the answers.
There’s more to Krauthammers think piece, but let me conclude his portion of my commentary on his commentary with this:
Obama will be loath to throw away the tools that have kept the homeland safe. Just as he will be loath to jeopardize the remarkable turnaround in American fortunes in Iraq.
Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success… Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands… The very continuation by Democrats of Bush’s policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right.
So there you have it, folks. Who will lead the way to rehabilitating Bush’s legacy? Who will continue to fight the War on Terror with the same limitation of options that Bush faced? Who will soon find himself on the defensive for war-without-end in the Middle East? Who?
I’ll give you a hint. His name rhymes with Yo Mama.
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