Thursday Open Thread [5.31.12]
President Bush is back at the White House today for his official portrait unveiling. For anyone expecting fisticuffs or tension, don’t. This ceremony is now a Presidential tradition performed before between bitter political rivals.
Obama and Bush have a cordial and respectful relationship, but they are not close.
Both are political veterans who are able to separate political tactics from what they see as an overarching community among people who have served in the Oval Office, according to people close to them.
History has marked this moment before, with grudges put aside.
When Bill Clinton came back for his portrait unveiling, Bush lauded him for “the forward-looking spirit that Americans like in a president.” This after he ran for the presidency to “restore honor and dignity” after Clinton’s sex scandal.
And when Clinton welcomed back George H.W. Bush, whom he had defeated, he said to him and his wife: “Welcome home. We’re glad to have you here.”
DOMA ruled unconstitutional by 1st Circuit Board of Appeals:
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Joining Cory Booker and John Carney, Bill Clinton cuts a Romney campaign ad.
Proving, as if more were needed, that Bill Clinton is a Wall Street whore. Once a shitheel, always a shitheel.
True but Clinton, even more so than Obama, gets by on his redeeming qualities.
And those would be?…
Peace and prosperity does it for me.
Those aren’t redeeming qualities. Redeeming qualities are found in the person, not in the luck of his time in office.
You are entitled to your own priorities. I know what mine are.
You are both right. You have to begin with the premise that politicians are all shitheels and schmucks. You have to hire the shitheel and schmuck that will cut bargains on your behalf with other shitheels and schmucks.
“You are entitled to your own priorities. I know what mine are.”
That’s nice, but I was talking about redeeming qualities, not priorities. Considering that you trash Obama’s every centrist instinct, I find it odd you’ll give Mr. Shitheel a pass.
Keep digging Geezer, and soon you too can be featured in a Republican campaign commercial.
If Obama’s policies created prosperity I’d give him a pass too.
“If Obama’s policies created prosperity I’d give him a pass too.”
Very curious. I would think you understood that prosperity is dependent on many variables outside the control of any chief executive. Yet here you are, as innocent of knowledge as a newborn Republican, defending Clinton — destroyer of the Democratic Party as we knew it, the least progressive Democrat since Harry Truman — because he held office during a decade of tremendous productivity gains spurred by computer technology, while slagging Obama for nearly the same set of policies. The only difference is that Obama took office during the explosion of a shitbomb, yet you credit one while blaming the other.
I fault Obama for not being more liberal, just as I fault Clinton for not being more liberal. Clinton, however, carries the extra taint of delivering himself and the Democratic Party into the theocratic hands of the GOP.
I now understand better why you hold some puzzling positions: You’re just not very good at understanding causes and effects.
You don’t get it Geezer. Clinton rolled back Reaganomics just a bit, and thus shrank the structural deficit, which was holding back economic growth. The good kind of growth, not just the “rich get richer” kind.
Whereas Obama continues the Bushonomics status quo and is – duh! – ending up with Bush-style growth numbers. If you do the same thing don’t look for different results.
And Obama held the pen that continued Bushonomics, so I’d say that was 100% under Presidential control.
See, a lot of liberal pundits were pretty prosperous under Clinton, under Bush, and under Obama, and they assume everybody else is too. They are more passionate about gay marriage than about a broad national prosperity. Talking about finally ending Bushonomics is just tiresome to them.
But if you don’t live in that permanent bubble of income and job security, it is a lot scarier to live under Bush/Obama policies than Clinton.
You’re the one who “doesn’t get it,” or rather, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I don’t know where you got this version of history, but economic growth during the ’90s was NOT about “rolling back Reaganomics just a bit.” Tax increases were put in place by Reagan and GHW Bush, too, so they should get some credit, too, in your simplistic view.
The boom in the Clinton years was based on major productivity gains, a “peace dividend” he did nothing to enable (or does he get credit for the fall of the USSR, too, in your telling?), Fed decisions he had nothing to do with, and a tech-stock bubble that burst just in time to stick GW Bush with the fallout. Most of that is luck, not design. Once he helped lose the House to the GOP, he enabled big chunks of GOP policy to become law, just as Obama has.
Obama, unlike Clinton, had to contend with a nominally Democratic Congress that was in fact stuffed with phony Democrat-Clinton clones like Tom Carper, plus a Senate that for the first time put every single issue to the filibuster standard of 60 votes, plus a Fed that already has used up it’s monetary-policy options. Given those circumstances, Clinton would have been just as hamstrung as Obama is.
Don’t misunderstand: Obama is just as guilty as Clinton of selling out liberalism, especially with his “grand bargain” offer to cut Social Security benefits.
But any superiority Clinton had to Obama is mostly in your mind — so much so that I now doubt your mind’s ability to comprehend any of what’s going on politically.
NAFTA is Clinton’s baby