It is a depressing list of foreign policy mistakes, disasters, and otherwise general bad news: Iraq is at best treading water, and at worst spiraling into civil war; Iran is blatantly moving ahead with plans for nuclear weapons; The Taliban are slowly creeping back into power in Afghanistan; The North Koreans test-fired a long range missile capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States; and the Israelis are fighting a war with Hezbollah on the frontier with Lebanon, eerily reminiscent of the 1978 invasion that led Hezbollah's creation.
And what is the most significant action taken by the Bush Administration in the past week? The first-ever veto by this Administration, five-plus years into power, of a bill. About stem-cells. A morally powerful but generally insignificant piece of legislation.
Last week the President, renowned as NOT one of the United Nation's biggest fans, was musing aloud to British PM Tony Blair about the current crisis in Lebanon and the UN's activities there, in front of an open microphone at the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. "See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over." He then went on to express to Mr. Blair that he feels "like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and make something happen."
Does anyone else see the irony in this? (There certainly is a lot of it, here. I am just not sure that the President understands exactly what is ironic about this whole affair.)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, gas prices are spiraling out of control, the economy is coming to a rip-roaring halt, Congress is spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, the Department of Homeland Security has done absolutely nothing to improve Homeland Security in the almost five years since September 11, 2001, and we are in the early stages of a hurricane season which promises to resemble the Monday-morning rush at the Lincoln Tunnel.
And the President finally remembers that he can veto legislation by the Congress.
The second Tuesday of November 2008 can't come here fast enough.
1 comment:
We must be stuck in some sort of cosmic time-delay. It is Election Day, and I am responding to a post in September that was a response to a post from July. Go figure...
My, how times have changed. Iraq is not treading water, it is out of control. As of this writing, there are 19 US war dead this month alone. 105 in October, making it the second deadliest month in this calendar year, and the fourth deadliest since the war began. And for what? The Iraqi administration of Mr. Maliki, while admirably displaying some independence for such a new democracy, has thumbed its nose at the Bush Administration, essentially saying that they aren't going to listen to the Americans about anything to do with benchmarks, timetables, or any other euphemism for progress. I'm betting that isn't exactly what the Administration was looking for.
Counting how many Taliban were killed, or how many Iraqi insurgents were killed, sounds a bit like body counts from Vietnam. They sound impressive, but they don't mean much.
As far as stem-cell research is concerned, I really don't have an opinion on it one way or the other. My point was that it shouldn't have been the first and thus-far only veto issued by this President, more than five years into his term, especially with the Republican-controlled Congress spending money like it was going out of style (and I am not talking about Defense-related appropriations, either).
To me, stem-cell research is one of those peripheral issues: central only to a very small segment of the population, and only the most ideologically extreme (of either persuasion) at that. Abortion would be another. Whether you are "pro-life" or "pro-choice", you are most likely to experience personally that issue if you are either the victim of the horrific crime of rape or are trapped in one of the lower income strata of our society. People with money, health insurance and other such resources are generally not those most affected by the issue of abortion.
And not to split hairs about stem-cell research versus cancer research, but people have been complaining for years about the lack of funding for cancer research; you just tune it out after awhile. (And what exactly would constitute 100% funding, anyway? Is there a point where researchers of any disease process say, "No we have just about all the money we need. We should find a cure with this amount of cash"?)
Gas prices are largely out of the control of any president, Republican or Democrat, and you know that.
As of today, unemployment is actually 4.4%, the lowest it has been in five years. Which means it was actually lower than today. Which also means that the economy can improve somewhat. And what is your reasoning for "the best its been in thirty years"? House prices are falling (for only the second or third time in the last hundred or so years, the first being the Great Depression), the National Debt ceiling had to be raised by the Congress past its previous limit, oil prices, though falling, are still 70-80% higher than they were ten years ago, the deficit is "cut in half" because of the unrealistically high projections by the Adminstration at the beginning of the year (a tactic that this President's administration routinely engages in - inflate the bad numbers early so they look at least on target if not bad later on) unemployment is down but inflation is up, and the list goes on. Your statement is not borne out by the facts.
Who's Paul Krugman? If he is a liberal bomb thrower from Air America, I pay about as much attention to him as I do Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, which is to say none.
Can you list the Administration's acheivements from the last five years? I would be glad to hear about them.
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