The Cuyahoga Rough Writers Blog

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the nonexistent "Austrian language" would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, would you have said that he is clueless?

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had misspelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years?

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?

If George W. Bush's administration had given the OK for Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether he actually “gets” what happened on 9-11?

If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

If George W. Bush had created the new positions of 32 “Czars” who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had taken over the health industry, added 159 new agencies with their added cost, laws and regulations, as well as taxing you on your employer provided health insurance, would have you approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive?

Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 16 months -- so you'll have two years and eight months to come up with an answer.

Stop me if you've heard this one before-"FBI" and "Cuyahoga politician" in the same sentence...

FBI Pulls campaign finance reports of County Executive candidate Ken Lanci

Read the article on Cleveland.com at:

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/06/fbi_pulls_campaign_finance_rec.html 

Unbelievable-A student asks a Democrat Congressman if he supports Obama's Agenda and this is what happened

http://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2010/06/14/long-hot-summer-begins-congressman-attacks-student/

How could anyone ever blame Obama for anything?

Today’s Opinion page in the Plain Dealer delivers a piece by Edward Wasserman, a newspaper editor and journalism professor, rife with complaints about President Obama receiving blame for the response to the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Well, alright, he isn’t exactly complaining about Obama getting blamed for the response, but rather, the initial spill itself.  Details being the inconvenient things that they sometimes are, it is in this point that Mr. Wasserman’s argument dissolves.

 

Among the targets of Wasserman’s contempt is Peggy Noonan, opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who on May 29, 2010 published an opinion piece, titled “He [Obama] Was Supposed to be Competent.”  The entire point of the article, which Wasserman either completely missed or consciously chose to ignore is that President Obama’s administration (at that point) had spent 40 days attempting to feign ignorance of anything happening in the Gulf, in the hopes that a shocked public would lay blame for the catastrophe solely at the feet of British Petroleum.  Nowhere in this article, nor in any other cited by Wasserman, is President Obama being accused of causing the initial spill itself.  Many people are critical of the lackadaisical oversight of drilling operations that led to the disaster, both by BP and the federal government, but those are problems that predate President Obama’s inauguration, and fair minded people understand that.

 

In Mr. Wasserman’s mind, it is unfair that a president he so admires be subject to the political realities that everyone else in his position has been, and will be again.  Was it fair that George W. Bush received all of the blame for the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005?  Of course it wasn’t, just as it wasn’t fair that Mayor Nagin didn’t receive the level of criticism that he deserved for epically botching the evacuation of New Orleans in the days leading up to the storm.  It wasn’t fair that then-Governor Kathleen Blanco didn’t receive the same kind of outrage that President Bush did for waiting until after the hurricane had passed to declare a state of emergency, allowing the federal government to legally act.

 

People like Wasserman are easily hoisted on their own intellectual petard.  So blinded by his holier-than-thou belief in his own moral superiority and his insistence that Barack Obama shares is moral clarity and intellectual prowess, he not only gets the argument wrong, but more importantly forgets that history has a way of repeating itself.  The lesson to be learned in how journalists are interpreting the response of the Obama administration to this disaster has little if anything to do with the predictability of the news media – Republican or Democrat, if you are president when a crisis this massive happens and you don’t handle it properly, you are going to be pilloried by the press.  The lesson instead is the same as it was in August of 2005, as Noonan herself observes in her aforementioned opinion piece: “When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.”

And just for a laugh, check out how BP handles a different kind of spill.