The real argument Obama should be making...

Forget Bain Capital and forget the killing of Osama bin Laden, here's the argument Obama should be making this fall. The main argument is not that George W. Bush left a mess, it's that Congressional Republicans failed to help clean any of it up.

President Bush left three major shit burgers for the Obama administration: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, of course, the fiscal meltdown caused by teachers, firefighters and policemen the complete lack of regulation of Wall Street and the mortgage derivatives market. But Bush just left those burgers there. In a time of national crisis, Obama shouldn't have had to eat those shit burgers all by himself, but he got no help from Republicans.

Congressional Republicans were fine conceding to "country first" proposals during those last sad months of the Bush administration and much to everyone's surprise, found their anti-keynesian "fiscal responsibility" just in time for the Obama administration. Who could have predicted that? Not only were they merely content with standing by while Obama and congressional Democrats tried to clean up the economic mess, they purposefully advocated counterproductive measures like reducing unemployment insurance and, in unprecedented fashion, refused to raise the debt limit which resulted in a lowering of our credit rating. An easy self-inflicted wound. Until President Obama, every debt limit ceiling vote had been a non-partisan matter of fact for Republican and Democratic presidents alike.

At a time when the problems we faced needed to be solved with the cooperation of both parties, the Republican party chose politics over country and we have the simple proof to show it. In the fall of 2008, George W. Bush finally saw the Keynesian light and chose the economy over his "conservative" principles and proposed a needed stimulus bill for the banking sector in the amount of $700 Billion, commonly known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP. After TARP failed to pass in the House due to Republican resistance, the market had its biggest one day drop in it's history since the great depression of more than 700 points. I guess the free markets love socialism (Remember everyone, government handouts are fine so long as they go to rich, white people). After having the shit scared out of them by reality, eventually 108 House Republicans voted for Bush's bank bailout, yet only three congressional Republicans voted to support Obama's stimulus bill which went to the American taxpayer instead of banks, which by the way, were composed of 1/3 of tax cuts!

Here's then Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) speaking on the floor, reflecting his pure anti-Keynesian, anti-spending philosophy. Wait a minute???



And here he is in the summer of 2009, referencing the Obama stimulus bill or the "Recovery Act" for the amount of $787 Billion dollars. As you can see he's going to hold the same "do what's in the best interests of the country, not your party" position as he held a mere months before and vote yes, right???



Mitt Romney is not the problem. Mitt Romney is a nice, smart man who was born to a wealthy family and decided he wanted to continue that way of life, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that the Republican Party has gone absolutely bonkers and their "no government" ideology has blinded them to pragmatic solutions to the problems we face. I think if we had a President Romney, due to his elite brain trained at Harvard, he would advocate for continued economic stimulus, also known as GOVERNMENT SPENDING, until we were fully out of this weak economy. The real question is, would his crazy party let him?