- Joined
- Dec 9, 2009
- Messages
- 134,496
- Reaction score
- 14,621
- Location
- Houston, TX
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Conservative
Two points:
1. Having family/friends in the military doesn't make your opinion suddenly more valid. One of the main reasons I didn't support Bush was because he risked the lives of my loved ones for seemingly no reason.
2. Libya and Iraq are vastly different in terms of scale and level of involvement.
Are you trying to make the argument that Bush was for smaller government? The guy who created a massive deficit, started 2 wars and implemented the Patriot Act, arguably one the greatest breaches of privacy in the history of the U.S.? Bush may have been socially conservative on some issues, but on most others (with the exception of his laissez-faire stance on business and tax cuts) he was everything bad about the Liberal position (essentially a Tax and Spend Liberal without the Tax part.)
First of all having family in Iraq indeed doesn't make me an expert but it does give me some insight into how members of the military felt about their mission and about what was going on in the country. One of them was stationed right in Saddam's main palace in military intelligence and had access to a lot of confidential information that he shared with me. Whether or not you supported the war or not at this point is irrelevant. My family members say we did the right thing but that was their opinion. We are in Iraq and to continue this argument is futile.
Second, Bush's economic policy was pro growth and pro business which is the exact opposite of Obama's and although Bush drove up the debt he didn't do it alone. He had a lot of help from Congress and that was under the control of Democrats since January 2007. Bush couldn't spend a dime without approval from Congress and since January 2007 to the present over 5 trillion has been added to the debt. Bush IMO beat the alternative of Gore and Kerry and anyon running against Obama will beat that alternative IMO. What most people ignore is that the GDP grew 4.5 trillion dollars in Bush's 8 years and some of that debt was attributed to 9/11 which according to the General Accounting Office cost over a trillion dollars.
Now we can continue to relive the Bush years but for what purpose. Obama is the issue and as has been stated it is amazing to me how little celebration there is here on his announcment yet more and more want to continue to demonize Bush. Let's focus on the Obama record and that is all that matters, not the rhetoric.