Prez Obama FTW!
The window of opportunity for commenting on the Obama inauguration is closing, so I’d better have my say, I suppose.
I’ve been reading and listening to some of the Bush retrospectives, and this one from the Economist is particularly good (h/t Brendan). On the one hand it’s quite gratifying to see that most of the media has finally woken up to the reality of the disaster that is the Bush presidency, I have to wonder why they didn’t start putting the boot in earlier? Like, say, any time before 2004?
It’s a risky proposition though, reading some of these retrospectives. Exposing yourself to the naked glare of the catastrophe that is the Bush presidency, is to invite madness. Each time I read about one of the epic failures of the Bush administration, I found myself thinking “wow, this is the most important thing for Obama to fix”, before reading on to discover something else which trumped it, and so on. Fix health care? Day one! Shutting down Guantanamo? No, do that first instead! Education reform? Arrgh! It’s all so important and all so fucked! By the end I wished I’d just gazed upon the visage of Cthulhu and been done with it.
So I just hope everyone just understands the scale and scope of problems that are now piled up outside the oval office. And that everyone understands the need for a lot of shoveling just to get the door open. Let’s all — myself included — hope we have the patience to wait until our man can get to work on whatever our individual #1 priorities are.
I think a lot of us found ourselves emotionally invested in Obama during the campaign, and have had an equally emotional reaction to his victory. This is fine, but reality is descending upon us and we need to remember that he is just a man. He’s going to stumble and going to act in ways against our interests or desires. (Some of us felt that way about the FISA compromise, for instance…) At time like these it may pay to look back to the Bush days and realise that, hey, at least we don’t have that fuckhead any more. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take great comfort in that fact.
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