I just read this article over at Salon.
I’m a little bummed. I guess, somewhat, because, after the re-election in 2004, I knew this would be the best possible scenario. That after trashing a budget surplus and a supersizing a downsized defense budget, the 43rd POTUS was going to leave my country in such a mess that even if a really great guy got elected, he wasn’t going to be able to do much good. We probably wouldn’t get to address universal healthcare or greenhouse gas emissions. We’d be too busy fixing everything that got messed up over the last eight years.
No, the legacy of Obama is probably going to be cleaning up the mess left by the administration of the 43rd President. With a little luck, we might get things back to 1999 levels just in time for another neo-con administration to steal its way into the White House.
Don’t get me wrong, I think 41 did a heckuva job in his four years in the Oval Office. He seems like a nice enough guy, even if he is an elitist member of the ruling class. I don’t think I’d shun my legacy if I’d be born to a US Senator from Connecticut. Even Nixon, the former arch-nemesis of the left, seems like, if anything, a victim of a system that had grown so out of control that it needed to chew up a commander in chief. The war crime atrocities of which it’s purported that he’s responsible, don’t seem as nasty compared to the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and the Extraordinary Rendition program.
And that’s just on the foreign policy side. I’m not even going to get into the domestic stuff.
I’ll start stress-eating again.
QuantumTom 