As you know, occasionally, we will repost pieces we appreciate. Here is a little something from our friend/writer Bruce Lindner who is always right on.
by Bruce Lindner
I sometimes marvel at how short-sighted this president’s adversaries are. As everyone knows, when he was sworn in six years ago, Senator Mitch McConnell announced that his primary goal was to make President Obama a one-term president. And true to his word, he’s hindered this president’s efforts whenever possible. The economy was in the porcelain fixture and President Obama found himself as welcome by the Republicans as if he had a rattlesnake slithering out of his pocket. So whatever was to become of his presidency, he’d either get ALL the blame or ALL the credit; with the Republicans pushing hard for the former.
The Bush recession was so deep and the bleeding of jobs so bad, it had nowhere to go but up. Not that this president’s policies didn’t contribute to turning things around, but the point being, the efforts of the Republican opposition — by their own decree — would be to contribute nothing. Had they had any smarts at all, they’d have cooperated at least enough so that they could later claim part of the credit for whatever successes were inevitably to come. But they didn’t. They stuck to their goal of pushing this president towards failure. Sorry about your luck Mr. Turtle; he didn’t fail. You did.
In the coming decades (assuming Karl Rove doesn’t get to write it), historians will record that the greatest economic dip in almost a century happened under an incompetent Republican administration that rammed through Republican foreign and domestic policies, largely opposed by the Democrats but backed with enthusiastic Republican support. We all know how that turned out. And the man who succeeded him, a Democrat who was met with open, often racially tinged hostility, turned things around before his two terms were up. In less than six years, all the jobs lost during the Great Bush Recession had been restored, the deficit had been whittled down by two-thirds, the stock market had gone through the roof, women’s equality, gay and immigrant rights had been advanced, Public Enemy No. 1 had been vanquished, the taxpayers spared from absorbing the healthcare expenses of uninsured patients, all without so much as a pinky being lifted by a single Republican…except for the ones this president had the courage to seat in his cabinet.
Things may look like the food fight scene from Animal House right now, but when historians have finished documenting and assessing the events of the Obama era, he’s going to come out looking like a saint, whereas the rabid opposition is going to look like a mob of Tasmanian Devils. Because of their own documented words and misdeeds, there’ll be no denying who did what, which party oversaw the Great Recession, and which president reversed it. Not even by Turdblossom himself.If he/she were smart – and that’s a BIG if – the next Democrat who runs for president should run on this record and remind the electorate daily of why the Republican candidate deserves zero credit for where things stand in November 2016. Because they contributed ZERO to any of the achievements listed above. And the record backs it up.
Bruce Lindner
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