Alert! Political Subject

I read my friend Brian Dickerson's blog the other day, and he made a post about how dissatisfied he is with the current administration and the President. I commented and he challenged me to find something - anything - that the current administration had accomplished that was not a disaster.

So I sat down and thought about it. I really haven't been able to understand throughout the Bush administration exactly what it is that makes some people so, well, hysterical about how much they dislike it, and Bush in particular. Also, the lengths that some folks will go to, to communicate their hatred for the President really shocks me. I know that my opinion of Americans in general has taken a sharp dip in the past few years, mostly due to the amount of emotional histrionics that people have put into their political opinions recently. Suddenly, everything is a conspiracy in the public eye. The media has taken to inventing crises because if the public isn't angry or scared, they don't watch news broadcasts.

So, I sat down and thought, and tried to take my emotions out of the equation. What good things have come from the Bush administration?

Well, I thought, it all started with 9/11. I thought the immediate response to the disaster was fairly well handled. Everyone stayed calm. All air traffic was immediately grounded and the planes left in the air at the time were tracked carefully. The one airborne hijacked plane was met with fighter jets and if it had gotten near a valuable target, it would have been shot down. In the days that immediately followed, the administration did a pretty good job of keeping the public informed without stirring up panic.

So far so good. Now, we all seem to be in agreement that the occupation of Iraq hasn't gone well. Can I blame the President for this? Well, not directly. In a war situation, the President has to allow the military to do the actual planning, unless he's got experience in doing that himself. My opinion is that Rumsfeld really screwed up the occupation. Can you blame the President for letting Rumsfeld run the occupation? Some, yes. But who knew that Rummy would do so poorly? He had a resume that read like Greenspan's. You couldn't doubt his credentials. He should have been replaced sooner, I agree, but it was nearly inconceivable that he could screw up that badly.

So we have one for the good, and one for the bad. For brevity, I'll bullet the next few things I'd like to point out.

• Iran and nukes. Truly, I think this has been handled very well. Eventually, Russia and China will give in to hard sanctions, and it will all be over with. Russia is already wavering because Iran won't pay them for the reactor they are constructing.
  
  
• Korea and nukes. This was also handled quite well. Kim Jong-Il was never serious about talking to us until we made China smack him in the face. Then we cut off his supply of Ipods and froze his bank accounts after we proved to the world that he was counterfeiting money and buying goods with it. Suddenly, he's ready to deal, and he can't cheat this time because his babysitters are watching.
  
  
• The economy. It's good. Revenues are up due to middle-class tax cuts. Only because of war spending is there a deficit. Unemployment is low. Pork projects are at an all-time low. Interest rates have been relatively low for several years now. Inflation is in check. Greenspan retires and is replaced by an actual competent successor. (The whole financial world has been holding its breath for decades over that, and Bush handled it perfectly.) The stock market has recovered and surpassed its pre-9/11 record highs.

All in all, I really can't find much to be unhappy with, except for the war in Iraq, which I think should have been wrapped up long ago. However, I think the invasion of Iraq has achieved a goal that most people don't realize was a major reason for it: It turned the focus of Islamic fascists to their own back yard, instead of trying to attack the USA in the USA. Iraq is a smudge-pot for Islamic radicals. Better there than here.

Anyway, this post has gone on for too long. I just wanted to reason out why I don't feel that Bush has done a terrible job. I conclude that all the fuss isn't about policy - it's about politics and who wants power and what they'll do in order to seize it.

That's all. Now I'm preparing to handle a bunch of nasty comments from people that I've never heard of. We'll see if I get some prime examples of folks that have abandoned reason and given in to hateful name-calling.