“Look no further than the bungled response to Katrina, the children left behind by No Child Left Behind, the vetoes of SCHIP (expanding health care for 6-10 million children) and the stem cell research bill.”
presidentsday
No plea bargains this Presidents’ Day
Sunday, February 15, 2009 1:47 AM EST -By GORDON GLANTZ
Tomorrow we have Presidents’ Day — systematically stationed between the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — to ostensibly honor the efforts and service of all our presidents.
What, then, do we do with the batch of terrible leaders we have endured in our history?
Presidents like the one who just packed up his duds and headed for Texas.
Some of you are now gnashing your teeth, saying: “He’s really going there again?”
Well, you better just move on to the comics or check out your horoscope.
I’m going there again.
And you can’t tell me that the eve of this rather minor holiday isn’t the perfect time to embark on such an excursion. Like Martin Luther King Jr. Day being a day of service instead of a day of sales, this is when presidential legacies — real and conjured — should be placed under the microscope.
Once nightmarish presidents decide to perish from the earth, rose-colored glasses are donned. There is a state funeral and every talking head with a microphone, blockhead blogger with a laptop or working stiff on a bar stool accentuates the positives — whatever few there may be — and lets the negatives blur and fade.
The textbooks tend to be just as kind — and inaccurate.
Because He Whose Name Shall Not Be Written (or spoken) is alive and kickin’ back, we must now act with haste.
While it hasn’t been a month, the view from here ain’t looking too good.
New president Barack Obama is finding out just what he got himself into. He will be spending perhaps all of his first term cleaning up his yo-yo of a predecessor’s mess.
Because the economy is such an overwhelming concern, the issues that loomed the largest during the marathon campaign season — health care, the ill-conceived war that virtually pushed the economy down this slippery slope, immigration, the environment, education, special interests, etc. — are placed out of view like gardening tools in a backyard shed during winter.
One would have to go to a nuthouse or a board meeting of one of the Big Three to find a potential president who could have created more problems in more areas in less than a decade of fumbling and bumbling.
For you people who wonder why I won’t even utter his name — why I wouldn’t consider him to have been my president — look no further than his pitiful body of work.
Look no further than the bungled response to Katrina, the children left behind by No Child Left Behind, the vetoes of SCHIP (expanding health care for 6-10 million children) and the stem cell research bill.
Look no further than opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, which is an international fight on greenhouse admissions that won’t discriminate between those who believe in the end of days and those who don’t.
Heck, this guy managed to anger his own conservative base with his “temporary worker program.”
Even a broken clock is right twice a day — but not when you want to sell port security to a Dubai-based company. Not when you want to appoint a glorified secretary, Harriet Miers, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Weapons of mass destruction, anyone? Civil war in Iraq — fought on the graves of more than 4,000 American soldiers? Mission accomplished?
Scandals? You want scandals? Scooter Libby? Alberto Gonzales?
And Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of Sept. 11, is still doing his broadcasts.
Want to be horrified? Read former press secretary Scott McClellan’s tell-all book, “What Happened.” Mortified? Listen and learn from what other former aides and staffers are now coming out of hiding and revealing.
The ex-president’s public defenders, while trying to plead him down to misdemeanor offenses, will offer up Sept. 11 in the court of public opinion.
I’ll give you part of that. Without that unforgettable day, we would have been looking at a run-of the-mill president whom nobody took too seriously — especially because he didn’t really win the 2000 election — who tried to peddle a redundant conservative agenda before getting voted out of office after one term (just like his daddy did).
But it happened, that unforgettable day. Like those great presidents for whom tomorrow is designed, he was handed the weight of a major crisis and gift-wrapped a chance for greatness.
He had a chance to unite this country of cliques and, through poor decision after poor decision, left it more charred with schisms.
He responded to the challenges by looking like Woody Allen trying to bench press his own weight. In turn, his approval rating between Sept. 11 of 2001 and his last day sullying the Oval Office dipped from 90 to 20 percent.
Let it go, you say? I understand your intention, but riddle me this: How are we to move forward without looking back and fully understanding how one president can let so much unravel on his watch?
There should be no pleading his case to misdemeanor charges in the court of public opinion. He has too much blood — foreign and domestic — on his hands. He is a felon.
Republicans, even those who soured on this clown long ago, say that history will wrap him in redemption.
Welcome to Cop Out City, folks. This is the place where we speak in code — like “history will be more kind … blah, blah, blah” — in order to close the door on what they see as a belabored conversation and, more importantly, avoid the harsh reality.
But each of us — of all political proclivities and walks of life — are living this harsh reality every day.
Including Presidents’ Day.
Another Stem Cell Blog 