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Tuesday, January 20. 2009

Today, as we prepare and wait for the most historic inauguration in our nation’s history since the very first to swear in George Washington as our first president, I might take time to reflect on the past eight years, as if the writing in this blog, consistently anti-Bush, hasn’t been enough.

But it bears remembering, for without George W. Bush and his eight failed years as president, we would not be waiting for the first person of color to be sworn in as President of the United States. Not to mention, in the previous two weeks both President Bush and Vice President Cheney took the interview tours to tout their “successful” tenure running the government.

I forget which commentator it was, but a “conservative” talking head on FOX said, with a straight face, Bush inherited the current recession. Even more astounding, this same commentator said Bush inherited the attacks of September 11, 2001. Makes your head spin.
 I have to hand it to Chris Wallace though. This morning during the coverage he has been quite even-handed, even laudatory, towards Obama and his supporters.

Bush wants us to respect him for making the tough decisions, as if presidents before him never had a tough call on their watches. All of the decisions made by the decider were so wrong! Who can forget the picture of Bush looking out Air Force One at the flooded carnage of New Orleans? In his final speech last Thursday, Bush claimed that had he landed, it would have kept some of the first responders from doing the important work of looking for survivors.

And yet, just days later, while those very same emergency workers were still rescuing survivors, he landed Air Force One, pulling police away from the rescue operations to protect his mediocre ass. Contradictions? I wouldn’t even call it hypocrisy. On Thursday Bush was just shooting from the hip. He has no idea what he said or what he did; has no clue he is, at the very least, being inconsistent.

In probably a most astounding dichotomy of our times, Bush has been one of the most stubborn — or steadfast if you prefer— of presidents. He decided to go to war in Iraq, despite the warnings, despite the realities and he used any means necessary to do so; a war his subordinates assured us would not last more than six months.

Here it is, six years later and that war continues while a just cause, in Afghanistan, was left to falter. A promise of getting the leader of the criminals who attacked us on September 11, 2001, “dead or alive,” not just unfulfilled, but brushed aside as if he never spoke those words.

In eight years we’ve seen a surplus of trillions of dollars turn into a debt of trillions, we saw a burgeoning work force with people gaining in their wages turned into the deepest crisis of unemployment in over 30 years — and the worst is yet to come.

Our civil liberties have been shredded, torn from the fabric of our nation for the expediency of winning political points. An attorney general who couldn’t remember the decisions he made, at the behest of his president, to hire and fire employees based solely on political affiliation, real or imagined. An attorney general who couldn’t remember his advice and decisions that led us to torture prisoners; not the judgment just of those of us on the left, but of a lifelong Republican judge who decided we could not prosecute one prisoner in particular because he had been tortured.

Six hundred words seems hardly enough to catalogue all the ills brought about by the administration of George W. Bush, but I’ve just witnessed the inauguration of Barack H. Obama. My friend John was sitting just feet away and if he noticed my tears of joy, he was polite enough to not mention it.

Here was an historic moment, an hour the entire world has been waiting to witness when, in what is a tradition over 200 years old now, we accomplished a peaceful transfer of power from one person to another, from one political party to another — from one generation to another.

Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chair of the inauguration committee, said it best when she reminded, not just us, but all those people around the world, friends as well as those who would oppose our society and our way of life, the power of the ballot is mightier than the power of the bullet.

A truth not born directly in our Declaration of Independence or Constitution, but a truth proven now for 220 years to be self-evident, that not only are all men created equal, we all have an equal voice in our government, if we choose to exercise our franchise every four years.

We, as a nation, have chosen this man, son of a woman of the Plains and a father from the Plains of Africa, who has called this nation to sacrifice, as previous presidents did in earlier generations, to right this faltering ship. President Obama reminded us that through difficult times, including a civil war and segregation, the nation not only survived, but went on to prosper.

What an irony, as President Obama noted that just 40-plus years ago his father would not have been able to sit and buy lunch at many lunch counters in that very city, our national capital. And less than 200 years ago, the National Mall, ringed now by monuments and on this day, roughly two million strong standing in the bitter cold to witness and be a part of this history, was itself once a place where our forefathers bought and sold Black slaves. The symbolism, the poetic justice of the moment, cannot go unnoticed, even by those who once opposed President Obama at the ballot box.

That Obama has an approval rating of 86% is unprecedented; more importantly, it shows just how strongly the nation is behind our new president. It would be more than hard to insist President Obama earned all of this support and good will. So far all we’ve received from the new president are words, but these are words filled with hope, lined with promise and spoken with authority.

We cannot only hope for the best for President Obama, he did call us to not only sacrifice, but to action to do our part and be a part of not only history, a part of a national restoration. Government, he has reminded us from the beginning of his campaign, cannot do it alone, we must play our part.

All we really needed was Barack H. Obama to get us started.

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 12:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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