Obama And Bush: Partners In Government Giganticism

Bush and Obama are not big government guys. Genghis B. and B. Hussein Obama stand guilty of government giganticism; of government elephantiasis ~ilana

Sean Hannity wants to know how Arlen Specter could go from “supporting George Bush, in some years 80-90 percent of the time, to supporting Barack Obama 96 percent of the time, considering the two men’s principles ─ their core values, their belief system ─ are in diametrical opposition.”

In their worldview, the Terrible Two are both self-righteous, reality averse Utopianism. Michael Scheuer, chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, drew the following parallels:

Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying ‘War on Terror’ and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Bush pursued wars that have contributed to the bankrupting of this country and the death of thousands of innocents. Obama has sustained the same momentum in those far-flung occupied lands. The gabbers on television who coo and kvetch nostalgic about Bush’s virtues should console themselves thus: Yes, The Decider was the originator; Obama nothing but a second-hander. But give Barack a break. The 44th president may not be as blessed with killer core values as the 43rd. But he’s doing his best. Has he not expanded the one theater (Afghanistan) to compensate for drawing down in the other (Iraq)?

The TV Mouths might wish to take their cues from neoconservative top banana Bill Kristol. Bush’s war doctrine (preemptive, endless, whatever) never failed to make Kristol crack a smile. Pursuant to his Nobel War Speech address, Obama The Warrior made Bill warm all over too.

Bush had to be in Cheshire-cat mode when Barack recently showered him with praise for the former president’s efforts on behalf of Mexican migrants. Obama can only dream of earning Bush’s street cred with Latinos. Heeding Ted Kennedy’s calling ─ aided by Specter and John McCain ─ Bush 43 hatched an amnesty program, defeated in 2007, that promised to be so grand as to dwarf the Great Migration, and devastate this country as thoroughly as the Immigration Act of 1965 did. Obama has not had “the cojones” (cringe) to attempt such overreach.

No doubt Bush took his duties to subvert the sovereignty of his subjects as seriously as Obama does. But Bush was more treacherous, crueler. A State in the Union imagined it could protect its citizens from the flotsam and jetsam flooding over the border. Obama has kept himself happy by suing what to him is an amorphous entity: Arizona.

Bully Bush, on the other hand, was inconsolable unless he could get up close to study his victims as they squirmed in pain. What Obama has inflicted on Arizona’s Ms. Brewer is nothing as compared to what Bush brewed up for Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. He incarcerated them for shooting a violent drug dealer in the derriere. Like a bulldog ─ and irrespective of public pressure ─ Bush bit down on his bait and would not let go until the good guys were jailed like goons.

In sundering state sovereignty, Obama has yet to best Bush. The state Bush had once governed was looking forward to dispatching a Mexican, José Medellín, who had raped and killed two of its daughters (Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña) in every conceivable way. That man needed killing! Bush disagreed. When Mexico sued the US in the International Court of Justice on behalf of Medellín, Bush intervened on the side of his killer compadre. The leonine Lone Star State went ahead and killed Medellín. (I cued the Mariachi band in celebration.)

“The government’s top economic experts warn that, without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold.” These were Bush’s words on September 24, 2008. But they could just as easily be mistaken for Obama’s. Both presidents (and their armies of baying bobbleheads) follow the economics of Fabian socialist John Maynard Keynes. This is why both men groped obscenely for their stimulus packages, for rebates, and for billions in bailouts. Such largess both presidents have “afforded” by counterfeiting the country’s coin and borrowing it into bankruptcy.

Moocher Obama has pulled ahead of Looter Bush with respect to deficits and debt. The Bush budget for 2009 was a trivial $3 trillion, while Obama’s 2010 budget was a respectable $3.5 trillion. According to “Bankrupting America,” “Bush doubled the debt to almost $6 trillion and Obama’s plans would leave us with an IOU of an additional $8.5 trillion by 2020.”

C’mon. Six trillion; Eight trillion: the act of racking up such financial liabilities exists on a continuum of criminality ─ it does not constitute a difference in kind (or in “core values”).

Barack’s tidal wave of regulation is hard to beat ─ in particular the financial-reform bill, which goes beyond Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams in increasing the overweening powers of the executive branch (Barack will be able to seize a firm he designates as systemically risky).

But a second-best to BHO The Regulator is not to be sneezed at. The Decider is still in the running for America’s Best Enforcer (a very bad thing indeed). Remember the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002? “W” and his Republicans own it. Sarbox or SOX cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. And the capital flight the Act initiated saw the London Stock Exchange catapulted to the preferred hub for capital markets.

So you see, in his devotion to both Bush and Obama, the shifty, ever-shifting Arlen Specter is on solid grounds. Not so Mr. Hannity.

Bush and Obama are not big government guys. Genghis B. and B. Hussein Obama stand guilty of government giganticism; of government elephantiasis.

As for TV’s Talkers: all are uncritical slaves to the ghost-ship of state, provided t
he pirates at the helm are members of their particular political faction.