This Progressive’s Self Diagnosis: Bush Withdrawal?

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I’ve been having the strangest feelings lately about politics. I worked for John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. I worked for a prominent Democrat for three years who struggled in a Republican-controlled Senate. I left that great job to get a little bit more education under the hood. But, ever since Obama trounced the previously derailed McCain-Palin train wreck and did his oath and “The Fox News-Mandated Oath Sequel” with Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States John Roberts (full title necessary, if you can recall and recite it properly), I think I might be experiencing Bush withdrawal. Is this even possible?

It’s also been difficult to comprehend that our President is not a boneheaded cowboy, but is instead an intellectual with gravitas that can speak in complex sentences. Sometimes too complex! Perhaps something about the time I bumped into greenhorn U.S. Senator Barack Obama, waiting for an elevator in January of 2005, made me feel this way?

He looked at me, a very young and equally green Senate intern, and simply said with that grin we know so well, “Hello.” Having seen his society-changing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I was a bit star struck and could only muster a genuine nod of my head. He seemed almost lost, waiting in a panic for a public elevator, when a Dirksen Senate Office Building Senators-only elevator was merely a walk around the corner away.

It’s strange that we were in seemingly similar situations, but very different circumstances. It’s also strange that after seeing him quite often in the Senate halls, he’s now the President of the United States. Hopefully time and events will replace the wily cowboy presidential image in my head with a hopeful and bright family man that seems to care for our collective plight nearly as much as he cares for his girls.

Hey, moving on is hard to do. Suddenly not having the same degree of worries wrought by the Bush Administration, though some linger, is a shock to the system!

Why? Well, there were just so many Bush Administration foibles to digest. MSNBC was a nightly free-for-all of Olbermann and Maddow diatribes. Editorial pages and investigative reporters could not keep pace with the rate at which the Bush Administration was conniving. There was just too much. The running list of petty thievery (and not so petty, see Halliburton), dishonesty, and morally corrupt acts will take even the best scholars a lifetime to chronicle. Unfortunately, not even a lifetime would suffice for such an endeavor. Also, the word “foibles” does not nearly cover the breadth of the matter.

Before the 2008 campaign hit full stride, George W. Bush plummeted to and then hovered at 20% approval and I thought for a moment, just one nearly immeasurable moment, that I felt sorry for him. I’m a nice guy. I’m sorry! It was such a low for America that it would have been nice if Bush would have realized his situation and worked with Congress to do a few good things on his way out. But he was a way too lame duck to do anything virtuous. It was sad to watch. And all we got was the much-maligned and as yet unproven TARP.

Anyway, that was clearly the wrong direction for my sorrow and I was quickly righted – to the sick, the needy, the under-educated, and the myriad of people, who are no less American than any other, that got nothing from the Bush Administration. They got so little. It was not the worst a government could do to its populace – a la 1938 holocaust– but Bush sure did leave a lot of people suffering and disappointed in their government.

They were left with foreclosure, hospital bills, vanishing retirement savings, personal debt, a stock market graph that would make a better ski hill than investment opportunity, vanishing banks and insurance giants, an environment headed toward fitness for only the toughest of roaches, students that can’t find the countries we invaded on a map, and dire threats and challenges from Jihadists and troubled regimes on nearly every continent.

Of course, George W. Bush and his Administration of crooked lying scoundrels (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, Libby, Addington, Dinh, Wolfowitz, et. al.) did not act alone. They had accomplices. Nearly the entirety of the 107th Congress, which was sitting when Jihadi terror was brought yet again to American shores, deserves some blame. For we have a separation of powers and checks and balances, right?

Wrong. They’re supposed to make sure the President doesn’t go hog-wild during crises. But they didn’t.

You already know the congressional cast of characters that were Constitutionally tasked with checking the executive power – Lott, Frist, Hastert, Delay, McConnell, Specter, Sensenbrenner – the crew that took your ship of rights and sank it with the USA PATRIOT Act and innumerable other pieces of Constitution-ignoring canon balls. They did it all in the name of fighting “terror.” That 107th Congress even spent part of its time with Democratic control of the Senate. It’s shameful, yet also a good lesson which we quickly forgot. Example, why all the support for former Senate Majority Leader Tom “Chief Capitulator” Daschle’s also sunken nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services?

So damaged was our moral authority by Bush and his enablers/assisters, that we couldn’t tell Iran and North Korea, “No, you can’t do what you’re doing,” or encourage Israel to exercise military restraint during a trying political campaign. Nor could we freely travel overseas and call ourselves Americans without being cursed. The Bush Administration’s myopic focus on irrelevant Iraq allowed al-Qaeda and others to spread in Asia, Africa and maybe even here at home. We were told we had to “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here!” Great idea that Iraq War Resolution was, huh, Congress?

My point is, we know Bush was responsible for a lot of what history will wisely consider crimes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t alone in committing them, and that says a lot about the possible states of democracy in America. Alexis de Tocqueville would be writing a very different book today.

All the damage done over the last 8 years left me truly cynical about the political process. It’s left me asking, “What are we left with?”

Well, it seems we were able to retain enough of our seemingly brittle Constitution that an election occurred. Praise be to the wisdom and moral fortitude of our founders!

We’ve also developed a sense of “hope.” A lost ideal, for progressives, resuscitated with the help of a once-lost U.S. Senator and a one-word campaign message that propelled a truly democratic movement. It’s a movement that has continued from the White House.

On day 2 of his presidency, President Obama signed an Executive Order to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. Here was a place where we, the United States of America, housed and tortured “terrorists” that had their writ of habeas corpus removed by a Congress, with a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, which passed the Military Commissions Act. Herein, we have another lesson to be learned.

Among many other progressive stances, we now have a President who doesn’t torture detainees. We have a President with a plan to end the War in Iraq. We have a President who embraces the concepts of global climate change and stem cell research. Hallelujah! “President Obama” – I gotta get used to that!

I was just so accustomed to reading the articles about how I was being spied upon, how my President was bombing and torturing for no reason, and how my country’s values were utterly obliterated. Things truly are better now with Obama! This was therapeutic. I may have just talked myself out of my withdrawal. I drank my fair share of bubbly on November 4, 2008 and I really hope it sinks in that the politicians in the offices have changed and I can move on from my tentative/angry/cynical disposition.

However, I still have serious concerns about the ability of our country to sustain even its very basic democratic and Constitutional principles/institutions: checks and balances, free and fair elections, free speech, free press, Congress makes war… and on and on… We must always be cautious and questioning.

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1. Thanks for this. There are so many liberals who want to

assault what's happening instead of making the best of it. It's like they never got over idiot son and their gripes with him.

My concerns aren't yours. I'm glad to have found a voice who is speaking the truth.

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2. I have my gripes...

and I do hope that we investigate. But not for the purpose of putting them behind jail (if possible, that'd be nice), but to learn how to avoid this kind of thing in the future.