This is NOT George W. Bush's Fault

I understand that writing a piece that is sympathetic in any manner to George Bush will not be well-received in some quarters. They believe, despite any reasonable evidence to the contrary, that everything about Bush and everything done by Bush (or others in his proxy like the devil Dick Cheney) is evil. I'll stipulate for the purposes of this piece that the presidency of George W. Bush is a mixed bag. For the handful of good things accomplished by Bush there were handfuls of bad things done by Bush. This is the same for any president. The achievements claimed by Bill Clinton as his own were mostly due to the Republican congress and with very little involvement by Clinton himself other than putting the pen handed to him by Newt Gingrich to the paper handed to him by the Republican Senate. This is not the stuff of George Washington or even Lyndon Johnson.

I'll not waste time or space discussing in great detail the good things done by Bush. I count the Chief Justice and Associate Justice as his two finest achievements. The rest can be rehashed later. The worst thing done by Bush was paving the way for Barack Obama to lay waste to the Constitution, and he did this by granting a wretched veneer of legitimacy to the concept of federal bailout legislation. It's unsurprising, considering Bush's belief that, "If someone hurts, government's gotta move." But lost in the past seven decades of American disinterest in all things Constitutional is the careful evaluation of what movement by the government is permitted by our founding charter.

Bush's 168 billion dollar "bailout" was a strategic disaster, but its morality and constitutionality are difficult to question. Giving the American people their money back is unquestionably a good thing, though some on the far left will debate that under the guise of Marxist theory. The problem with the Bush plan was one of logistics and forward-thinking strategy. Logistically, creating the bipartisan perception of a bailout was a mistake, as we have seen by the way the Obama contingent has put the Bush plan on steroids. In addition, the tax rebate given back to the American people was so small that it made no impact on the level of disposable income needed in order to reverse course of the economic contraction. A healthy income tax rate cut across the board, accompanied by massive cuts of wasteful government spending would've turned the economy around in no time at all. But alas, we play the cards we're dealt. And Bush dealt poorly.

With respect to the lack of forward thinking, the Obama team was able to say, as they always do, that "Well, Bush did it!" in order to give the same veneer of legitimacy to his 800 billion dollar spending bonanza. And that second spending bonanza is giving way to discussion about the need for a third. The slippery slope to bankruptcy is greased with the ink of American printing presses as our answer to meet these spending commitments has been the disastrous decision to print more dollar bills.

But appearance is not the only major difference between the approaches of messers Bush and Obama. The differences that need critical analysis are differences of morality and constitutionality. Bush's approach was to give the American people their money back in an attempt to stimulate spending, which would stimulate the economy as a whole. This is a good thing. The Obama cartel's approach was, as usual, to appropriate the language of conservatives in order to advance a hard core liberal agenda. Obama sold his spending binge on the same grounds, but in actuality his was a grotesque litany of kickbacks to union allies and other special interests that poured money into the Obama campaign coffers. Whatever we disagree on, we should all be able to agree that money that belongs to the American people should not be spent on extra-constitutional activities of the party in the White House in an attempt to secure their interests in the next election. The Obama approach is morally disgraceful and completely unconstitutional and if we have any hope of reversing course we must articulate these truths with force and respect for the other side. One thing perfectly clear, though, is that for all of Bush's failures, after Obama's 800B stimulus porkapalooza, the trillion dollar environment scheme and the trillion dollar socialization of health care, none of what we are sowing now is the fault of George W. Bush. This all can be placed on the back of Barack Obama and the 60-plus million American voters who installed this hack into the presidency.