Conservatives Say: It’s OK If Obama Blames Bush
Yes, whenever the sagging economy comes up, or the foreign quagmires, Obama blames Bush. And certain talk show hosts have defensive hysterics over that.
But, unlike neocons at Fox and on the radio, and other advocates of Big Brothernment, true Conservatives have no problem at all with this, for two reasons:
First) It’s true. Bush governed like a Liberal, spending money, increasing regulations, and dragging us into a trillion dollars in wars, and then mismanaged them abysmally. Even if it is embarrassing to ”our side”, we believe in supporting the truth, taking responsibility for mistakes (something Bush rarely did), and fixing problems.
Second) It’s not a condemnation of Conservatism, anyway, because Bush was so Liberal. Like neocons in general, he only talked Conservative, but when the chips were down he always turned to huge government solutions, more squandering of taxpayer money, et cetera.
It’s no surprise that we had economic and political trauma, when Bush violated Conservative principles in these ways:
- He had claimed the economy needed to be deregulated, yet he rolled out more huge regulatory schemes, even counting only his first two years in office, than Clinton did in eight…hundreds of billions of dollars in new regulations on insurance, shipping, health care, and many other industries.
- Even his “tax cuts” were mostly semi-annual welfare checks disguised as “refunds”, along with “tax credits” that are literally welfare, plus a maze of new exemptions that truly increased tax compliance cost just as much as any actual tax savings. Compare this to Reagan simplifying the tax code so much that people saved as much in compliance costs as they saved in taxes.
- His “solution” to the failure of socialized education was to break his School Choice promise and set up a massive Federal bureaucracy called No Child Left Behind.
- His response to 9-11 was to set up a police state in violation of the Constitution, to refuse Afghanistan’s offer to turn over bin Laden for war crimes trial in order to invade, and to attack Al Qaeda’s mortal enemy, Saddam Hussein.
- His promise to make Socialist Security more privatized and voluntary was abandoned because he was spending all of his political capital on a voluntary trillion-dollar set of wars.
- Speaking of socialism, until Obama’s health care plan passes (shudder), Bush’s prescription drug plan stands as the largest socialized medicine expansion in US history.
- Speaking of being more Liberal than Clinton, in EVERY SINGLE YEAR, of his eight years in office, Bush increased domestic spending more than Clinton did in his entire second term.
- His answer to Katrina was to throw $87,000,000,000 dollars at the region, that had already squandered more than the rest of the nation’s combined Army Corps of Engineers budget at NOT fixing its levees.
- His response to the economic decline was to not only increase spending above his super-Clinton levels, but to bail out companies and squander hundreds of billions on “stimulus” packages that actually depress the economy more.
Who’s seriously surprised that this kind of socialism caused an economic depression? Hoover’s big-government approach helped cause the Great Depression, and Bush’s similar approach did the same.
Real Conservatives don’t try to defend this. Instead, we say:
Yes, that’s right, Bush’s domestic policies cause economic catastrophe…so stop doing exactly the same stuff, Obama!
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
Speaking of tracking:
You can follow But Now You Know here, on Twitter
And you can follow But Now You Know, via our Facebook Page, here.
Share This Article
Words of the Sentient- Mandating Your Health is Tyranny
- Government’s Power to Give, is Its Power to Take
- The Defense of Liberty
- Right and Left Wings of the Same Bird of Prey
- Arms Protect Your Property and Freedom
- Conservatism is Libertarian
- I’ll Defend, to the Death, Your Right
- The Flip-Flopping Moderate
- Honest Cynicism
- Punishing the Industrious
- Pithy Pontifications
- Martha Stewart Did Nothing WrongWhat makes something good, or bad, is not whether it’s legal or banned. Anyone who disagrees can go explain it to Mr. Schindler. The difference between right and wrong, good and bad, is whether you violate another person’s property (including their body). This is the one universal “good versus evil” shared by all societies and [...]
- How Green Food Causes World Hunger — Eggs“Organic” and other “Green” agriculture and food production is already widely understood to be causing food shortages, and skyrocketing food prices, worldwide, but it’s often too subtle and abstract an effect for regular people to really understand. But now we have a very stark, clear example, a crisis caused by imposing “ […]
- Today, Congress Will Kill 387 PeopleNo, I don’t mean Congress will order the execution of 387 people today. I’d almost respect that more, because it’d be direct and therefore, in a sense, far more honest. But, according to a snowballing body of science, the sleep deprivation you’re suffering today because of Daylight Saving Time ends up killing hundreds of people, [...]
- How Bush/Obama Create Terrorists“Look, we are AGAINST the Taliban, but if this action is repeated, we will all join the Taliban, and then these [US] forces will not be able to stay one more minute in Afghanistan.“ Next time some ridiculous neocon claims Muslims become terrorists simply because they hate our “way of life”, not because of what [...]
- How Government Stimulus Caused the Great DepressionFiled under: Economy, History Tagged: depression, government spending, great depression, herbert hoover, hoover, jobs program, obama, stimulus spending
- Worried about Bed Bugs? Thank the EPAYes, we all know that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of millions by malaria. But there’s something far more important to us in the US: The scourge of bed bugs has been spreading like wildfire, and they are really unpleasant. Bed bugs were pretty-much extinct in the US, by the early 1970s, killed [...]
- Ron Paul in the General ElectionThere is this common myth that a “moderate” Republican — a big government interventionist — is the best choice for a general election. They are called the most “electable”…by the Big Government advocates in the media. As proof of this, we can look to how well Bob Dole and John McCain did. Conservatives compromised their principl […]
- The Censorship Known as Campaign Finance ReformWe’ve had two major rounds of ”campaign finance reform” violating the first amendment in the past forty years. Each one has turned out to INCREASE the very bribery and corruption they were supposed to end, becoming the very means of filtering money to candidates or officials, and promoting causes out of proportion with their real [...]
- Killing the Economy to Create JobsNeither the government, nor any business in the private sector, should be specifically trying to “create jobs”. That is like noticing that a healthy, fit man’s heartbeat is slower than a fat, sick man’s heartbeat, and therefore going around giving people drugs to slow their hearts: You are treating the symptom, but aggravating the pro […]
- Occupation is ViolationTo “Occupy”, in the sense intended by the current hipster protest movement, means “to enter and take something, and refuse to stop”. If one of these tantrum-throwing brats were to do the same thing to a date’s body, it’d be called rape. The Occupiers are specifically trying, as they said they would, to interfere in [...]
- Martha Stewart Did Nothing Wrong
