The More Things Change

While the Prez Obama has yet to complete his first term, it is turning out be nothing more than the Bush Administration kicked into hyper-drive and twice the cronyism.  The more I evaluate the Prez’s various actions, I can’t help but thing about how much this is like a much more incompetent version of George W. Bush, if that were possible.

Among the first actions the Prez took was to have his shoulder pad wearing linebacker Secretary of Homeland Security declare war veterans, Ron Paul supporters, and most libertarians tagged as potential terrorists.  In other words, that who fiasco, which did backfire due to the treatment of veterans, was nothing more than an early exercise in thought crime enforcement.  Basically, the Prez was targeting all those bitter clingers he mentioned on his campaign trail.  But hey, I guess I shouldn’t complain too much; after all he didn’t bother to target Muslims or extreme communists movement, even though both groups are more likely to commit suicide bombings (see Tamil Tigers for more information on suicide bombing communists).

In any case, I suppose the Prez had good intentions in dealing with political dissidents.   It is not like he used the IRS on them like Bill Clinton did.  He did, however, promise us to close down the prison in Guantanamo Bay and he has done just that.  Oh wait, he has left it open.  He did release some of the prisoners, but many of them returned to Islamic terrorism because they have been imprisoned for several years by Christian America.

Our beloved Prez did make the crucial decision to have Bin Laden executed.  Apparently, it took him several months to make the decision, in which he took several vacations and generally did next to nothing, except release his birth certificate.  It is strange that he had Bin Laden executed around the same time that he released his birth certificate.  Perhaps he did not want any of us to notice that it was a forgery.  Seriously, if it was a direct scan, then the PDF should not have had any layers in it.  He should have released it as a TIFF file.  Maybe then most people would have accepted it and he would not have had to trample Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Speaking of wars, we seem to still be engaged in them on a massive scale.  The Prez has clearly shown his contempt for Congress in defying him by continuing his war in Libya.  Of course, if House Republicans had any balls, they would have defunded the war last week.  Kudos to the Prez for the having the foresight to know that Boehner is a complete buffoon.  In any case, the Prez has exceeded the neocons’ wettest dreams by having the United States engaged in six wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and now Somalia.  By the end of his term, we are probably going to be engaged in a war with Iran, Kuwait, Botswana, and Texas.  May as well make it an even ten, right?

The Prez has also exposed his own insecurities by repeatedly attacking Texas for their open defiance of the TSA, which never actually made it into law due to some Statist Republicans.  First of all, he denied Federal aid during the tornados or flooding or whatever else is happening in the Midwest that I do not really care about.  Now he has interfered with the execution of Mexican national who brutally raped and murdered a girl all because he was not allowed to speak to some Mexican officials.  I am sure the Mexican government would afford me the same courtesy if I raped a Mexican girl, then beat her head with a rock until her brains spilled out, then stuck a stick with a screw on the end up her nether-region, and all not necessarily in that order.  But hey, diplomacy matters only when you are trying to get back at your rival.

All-in-all, I am impressed that the Prez has managed to not only maintain the Bush agenda, but speed it up while at the same time paying off his supporters with tax dollars of my non-existent children and grandchildren.  Of course he told us it was economic stimulus, but the only thing that ACORN ever stimulated was an underage hooker’s, well, you know what I mean.

Still, the thick irony of it all has me just plain tickled with annoyance and cramping.  While conservatives have been among the biggest suckers for the longest time when it comes to the GOP, it is quite clear that the biggest suckers have been the Left-wing Statists all along.  You see, all those things the Democrats pretended to oppose under Bush were really just angry reactions to ideas they believed the ex-Prez has stolen from them.  In other words, it was never about the cause, but pride.

George W. Bush Was Not a Conservative

Now that the dust has settled and Obama has been President for almost a year now, I think it is time to look back on former President Bush’s terms and evaluate his claims of being conservative based on his actions:

• No Child Left Behind Act - this was an act supported by George W. Bush in collaboration with the late Senator Ted Kennedy (who should've succumbed to a brain tumor much sooner than he did, proving that Satan does exist). This expanded the Federal tax dollars spent on education and thus a bigger government budget. Not conservative policy.
• USA PATRIOT Act - OK, this is a third rail and defines a clear divide between libertarians and conservatives. I would include liberals, but liberals only care about supposed civil rights violations when they aren't in power. You don't see many lawsuits from the ACLU brought about in New England, right? Yet I am sure many of those local communities have the same "civil rights" issues that the ones in red states do, if not more so. Anyway, I do think that this legislation wasn't really thought through and passed in haste. Regardless of the intention, the abuse of it is what I really fear (Janet The Manly didn't take long to declare right-wingers to be terrorists). Not really conservative, but willing to let it is slide for now.
• Establishment of Homeland Security Department - Really, did we need one when we already had a Department of Defense? Why not just consolidate all the relevant agencies under that department? DOD is not a strictly military agency anyway. Not conservative.
• Tax Cuts - that was conservative
• Federal Spending Growth - this may very well have been what cost the Republicans in 2006. Many conservatives were truly upset with the rapid growth of government spending in spite of tax cuts. Bush's excuse was that because his party controlled Congress, he would support any legislation they passed. Talk about fiscal cowardice. Instead of leading Congress in the direction they should have gone in, like so many Presidents of the past, he refused to lead and allowed the RINOs to take control of Congressional policy. Oh, and did I mention that the national debt went up 4 Trillion while he was in office? Not conservative.
• Social Security Reform - While the mainstream press called this the "third-rail" of politics, this was something that everyone except for the one demographic who votes most really wanted. Even though it didn't go far enough for my tastes (outlawing such a program for everyone 40 and under would have done it), it was something that went in the right direction. Therefore, this was conservative.
• Medicare Expansion - While this goes under "Federal Spending Growth" this deserves a special case because President Bush pushed this legislation through without popular support, except for the AARP. This was not a conservative policy and I am surprised it didn't cost him 2002 seats. I guess we were just hopeful then.
• Immigration - President Bush failed to protect our borders. Instead he pandered to the Hispanic radicals and opposed any kind of illegal alien enforcement, short of minor enforcement. He didn't even bother to attempt to reform the our slow Visa approval process, which is the primary cause of illegal immigration in the first place. On top of that, when Americans stepped up and decided to protect our borders themselves, he referred to them as vigilantes. Oh, and don't get me started on Ramos and Campean. All in all, the President failed in his duty to uphold immigration laws during his term. Not a conservative in the slightest here.
• Intelligence Programs - President Bush relied too much on Clinton holdovers in the intelligence community. As such, we had bad Intelligence on Iraq (there were no "stockpiles" of WMDs, although there were indications of WMD-making materials) and he never bothered to hold George Tenet accountable for his repeated incompetencies (9/11, Iraq, etc.). Instead, he set up the precedent for establishing czars by setting up an intelligence czar. A better option would have been to incorporate all intelligence agencies into the Navel Intelligence agency and consolidate all information there under military control. But no, instead of taking the opportunity to clean up some of the government messes we have, he instead made it bigger. Not conservative.
• Foreign Policy - You know, I'm going to claim neutrality here because conservatives have different viewpoints on foreign policy.
• War Policy - While I was OK with going to war in order to dismantle and destroy the Islamic terrorist networks that threaten us, the wars were mishandled once the US military conquered the country they were in. Instead of lifting many of the stupid rules of engagement that handicap our troops, he maintained them and allowed more troops to die than needed as a result. When you go to war, you need to take it seriously and resolve it quickly. War is economic suicide when prolonged for any nation (case in point, the War on Poverty). However, this viewpoint is not shared by conservatives, so I cannot declare this as not conservative because I'm not sure if it is even political. Oh, and formal war declarations with stated objectives should have been made by Congress here as well. They really passed the buck on that one.
• Abortion - Despite his Judicial nominees, he never really took a moral stand on this issue during his terms as President. The most he did was stop funding overseas abortions with tax payer dollars (something that Obama restarted immediately). He didn't even bother to veto a budget that funded pro-abortion organizations like Planned Parenthood, nor did he support a pro-life bill proposed by he-who-shall-not-be-named. Word has it that Laura Bush herself was pro-choice, which means he wore this issue on his sleeve in order to attract the single-issue suckers, I mean, voters. Not conservative.
• Capitalism - He opposed it and supported Corporatism over free markets. That's why he bailed out the banks and did not seek to deregulate all the regulated industries. He may have believed that he was supporting capitalism in the process, but he was not. Oh, and don't forget him signing off on unemployment benefits. Not conservative.
• Secretary Picks - He allowed Clinton holdovers and obvious Statists to run many important agencies. Norm Mineta, Michael Chertoff, and Hack Paulson are just a few of the really bad picks to run some of the most important agencies in the Federal government. It really would have been better if he just randomly selected people from the phone book there. Not conservative.
• Judicial Picks - He was conservative here, for the most part. Harriet Miers was the only person who exposed what he probably really wanted as a Federal judge.

So in retrospect, George W. Bush was not a conservative, despite what we were lead to believe. Now, I know that not everyone can be 100% conservative, but at the same time he has enough differences because of his actions or inaction on certain issues and his overall policy stances to accurately say he was a Statist.

To be fair, there were a lot of issues that were stalled or stopped by Congress, but again, he never really stepped up and lead his own party, which could have taken care of a lot of these issues during his first six years. I will say that he was not a Socialist, but definitely a Statist.

For the next Presidential election, I urge my fellow conservatives to not be fooled.  Just because someone claims to be one or is given a ringing endorsement from a conservative pundit, it does not mean it is true.  Always look at their background and actions as a politician.  That is always a better way of determining if a politician is conservative.

President Bush Officially Sucks Now

I was a supporter of George W. Bush for a long time. I voted for him twice, not just because he was a Republican, but because I liked his many of his campaign promises. In 2004, I especially liked his privatization plan for Social Security.

But he has been a huge disappointment. Despite his immediate response to 9/11, I'm seriously reconsidering all of his polices with regards to the war on terrorism. Nevermind that it is a buzzword, as terrorism is an aggressive political tactic that cannot be defeated, his handling of the war has been a joke. If he had been heavy handed, most of the Islamic terrorists who threaten us would be dead or in hiding, not sitting in a prison where they are fed better than some of the children in the countries they come from. If I had my way, I'd inject all enemy combatants with pigs blood and put a bullet in their head.

The one thing that I've been so frustrated with is President Bush's pushing of a clear Socialist and Humanist agenda in economic and social issues. Not only does he routinely not show a clear faith in free market economics, he also has shown contempt for the very people who supported him throughout his Presidency. While is probably a nice guy, his brains have been flushed down the toilet a long time ago.

I use to believe in him as President. I use to think that he was laying the groundwork for a better America. Now I see that he was just helping out his rich buddies who contributed to his campaign. And what's the deal with his selections for Cabinet? A diplomat was chosen to head up Homeland Security?

And why wasn't the director of the CIA and the head of the FBI fired after 9/11? That's a monumental failure. And still President Bush seemed insistent on parading the failures around and giving them medals. He has also shown no desire to reform the tax system (his panel to do so basically asked for what happened back in the late 1980s, which was not reform, just a flushing of the buffer, so to speak).

But I do have to admit, he's made me libertarian-minded as a result. Because of his disregard for the Constitution and his callousness toward conservatives (who seem to still defend him, despite his obvious contempt for them), he has turned me and I'm sure many others further to the right in order to maintain some semblance of true freedom.

I despise the current "frontrunner" candidates and the President. They do not represent hope or freedom, but oppression and tyranny. And everyone seems Hell-bent on voting for one because he's not the other. That's the only reason any common idiot will vote for Obama or McCain. Very few people are voting for them. They are all voting against the other.

Folks, don't let fear be your guiding factor in life. Fear is what brings about tyranny. Fear is the enemy we face these days.

And President Bush knows how to use it to sucker-punch the American people. Does anyone think that Obama or McCain will do any better? If you do, you're a retard and you shouldn't vote.