Direct Results Of Previous Presidents

For the first few years of his administration President George Bush was able to blame a lot of the things that were going wrong on the record of President Bill Clinton.  When inflation was on the rise it was Mr. Clinton’s fault.  When unemployment started to rise it was because of Mr. Clinton’s policies.  When the trade center towers fell it was because the Clinton administration didn’t go after Osama bin Laden hard enough.  When the all of America’s military muscle and national intelligence couldn’t catch the mastermind of al-Qaeda it was because Mr. Clinton left those organizations in such a bad state for Mr. Bush to inherit.  When the deficit started to rise it was because the previous administration didn’t pay it down fast enough.

But truth be told everything that has happened to this country for the past nearly eight years was the direct result of Bill Clinton.  Relatively speaking we had it good during the Clinton years.  People had jobs and the economy was going well because people had enough confidence in things to keep the bubble inflated.  The national debt was actually being paid down after years of reckless spending.  We were not in some godforsaken perpetual war.  We had problems but they paled in comparison to the things we face now.  And because we had it so much easier on a national level we had the luxury of taking our eyes off of national issues and started to focus on matters of ethics and morality and character.

It didn’t help that Mr. Clinton was a philanderer caught red handed in Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress cookie jar.  So many people who were sticking their own hand in somebody else’s cookie jar.  But it didn’t stop people from humiliating the President with a big to do with impeachment hearings.  A man gets caught having an affair and other people having their own affairs want to prosecute him for it.  It didn’t help that the Democrats in the Congress were rolling over faster than Krypto the super dog.  The Democrats didn’t even try to support the leader of their party.  It was inevitable that a change was coming.  Eight years ago we wanted someone who claimed to moral and ethical and wanted to bring integrity back to the oval office.

Eight years later we find ourselves in a polar opposite situation.  The country is floundering economically and militarily.  It might be nice for some people to focus on feel good issues like voting for a President that will make us feel smart because the President and his running mate actually look so intellectually lacking.  It might be nice for some people to vote for the man to be President who is so conservative that he or she is willing to revoke a woman’s right to choose for her self what happens to her body.  It might be nice for some of us to vote for the man to be President who will change the Untied States Constitution so that marriage will for the first time in history be defined as the union between a man and a woman and we will stick it to all those same sex couples.

But because we collectively no longer have the luxury to focus on conservative issues of morality and the regulation of other people’s morals we need a President who can focus on getting us back into a healthy economic status and restore some semblance of national strength to our global neighbors.  Because things are so dire we need to bring our attention away from our moral values and make sure we protect our economic values.  The President with the best plan to calm the jitters in the economy sounds so much more important than the President that’s ready to pass some kind of same sex prohibition.  The next President will be a direct result of Mr. Bush’s inability to keep his focus on our national issues.

Like Mr. Bush is a direct product of Mr. Clinton’s time in the White House, the next President will be a direct result of Mr. Bush’s presidency.  But while Mr. Bush was able to indulge his conservative leanings because of the comparative success of Mr. Clinton’s national stewardship, the next President will have to roll his sleeves up and work harder than most Presidents ever did to repair the damages and failures of the Bush administration’s leadership.

If Mr. Bush had done a better job of keeping the economy on a more even keel then more of us would have been able to continue to select our next President based on whims designed to punish others who may not live up to our ethical or moral standards.  Quite frankly, I believe we shouldn’t be using such matters in our presidential equation.  If the President wasn’t so focused on making us adhere to his standards of behavior he might do a better job of running the country.   Thankfully, Mr. Bush has done more to bring this concept home than any other President has in a long time.  Hopefully, the next President will be a direct result of the lessons learned from Mr. Bush’s presidency.

Barack Obama Wants To Kill Babies

I just got through reading an email from a conservative friend of mine who thinks Senator Barack Obama is pro-abortion.  The email is an article from Robert P. George, a conservative faculty member at Princeton University.  One of the points the article makes is a comparison of the abortion issue to the enslavement of black people during America’s institutionalized slavery.  The author of this rant against Mr. Obama says that no one today would say the enslavement of black people is a matter of choice.  Why would we accept the notion that abortion is a matter of choice?

I am offended that this author would equate abortion to the enslavement of our African ancestors.  While our African ancestors spent their entire lives in virtual torture and misery, being beaten at the whims of white people, with nothing to show for their labor but the rags on their back and subhuman food, white people benefited.  White people beat slaves for trying to educate themselves.  White people fought hard to keep black people from being recognized as human.  White people would impregnate our female black ancestors and then sale their babies own offspring away.  This subjugation of the African American has destroyed the esteem of black people.  And this is the equivalent of an abortion?

The enslavement of black people was the foundation of America’s early prosperity.  The sole purpose of slavery was to enrich the dominant community.  Slavery was an economic issue supported by widely accepted racial disparity and hatred.  Who is saying that abortion is being fueled by America’s institutionalized hatred of the fetus?  Nobody is saying that abortion needs to be on the table in order to keep the economic status quo.  No one said that abortions will impact the finances of plantation owners.

The analogy is just a distortion of an invalid argument for the demise of a woman’s right to chose for her self.  It’s not “pro-abortion” but “pro-choice”.  We can apply such a baseless analogy to other examples of human behavior.  It’s not “pro-murder” but a “pro-choice” to take someone else’s life away.  It’s not “pro-theft” but a “pro-choice” to steal.  It’s not “pro-wife abuse or child abuse” but a “pro-choice” to commit acts of violence against other, weaker people.  It’s not “pro-tax evasion” but a “pro-choice” not to follow tax laws.  The useless comparisons are virtually endless.

And the argument that people should be free to stipulate that they don’t want their tax dollars to support government programs that they don’t agree with is another invalid argument.  We don’t get to pick and choose what government programs we want to support.  Personally, I don’t want my tax dollars to go to the war effort.  I believe every citizen should have the right not to fund America’s insatiable war machine that has been let loose in the Middle East against Iraq and Afghanistan.  I don’t want my tax dollars going to find Camp Guantanamo.  I don’t want my tax dollars paying for Dick Cheney’s next rectal exam.

But it does.  As an American citizen I don’t have the luxury to say what I will and won’t fund.  We are supposed to be in this social construct for better or for worse.  If we are going to give one group of people the right to pick and chose what they want and don’t want to fund then I say we all should have an a-la-cart style tax system.  Trust me, the way the black neighborhood catches the worse end of any social services funded by our taxing system, I’m ready to make some seriously deep cuts to my bill.

Saving every human life possible is not even close to being the objective of a pro-lifer.  These people will move heaven and hell to force a woman to bear a child that she would prefer not to, but wouldn’t give a damn about dropping a five hundred megaton bomb from the latest skunk works bomber on downtown name-your-city in Iran, Syria, Liberia, Panama, North Korea, or Spain if they don’t get their act together and tow the American line.  How many children have lost their lives thanks to American bombs?  Where are the pro-lifers to detest this loss of life?

Pro-lifers don’t bat an eye when police shoot the life out of a black suspect for walking home with groceries or driving home for his wedding day.  When pro-lifers take their stance of protecting life seriously I might listen to their selective arguments.  But the single minded insistence of forcing a woman to have a carry her fetus to term and then people washing their hands of any responsibility to the woman and the baby after it’s born just for the sake of saving baby lives is rather shortsighted.

I am no fan of Mr. Obama for my own reasons.  But to boil the presidency down to a single issue that isn’t even truly an issue for right winged conservatives that not only does Mr. Obama wants to win the White House solely for the purpose of aborting as many babies as possible through government policies, Mr. Obama will make abortions mandatory.  Mr. Obama also wants to abort babies up to the very second that they’re born.  He’ll even abort babies after their born the way some people like to distort their version of the story.

Mr. Obama said that if his daughters made a mistake he wouldn’t want them to be punished by having an unwanted child.  Now I’m sure Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle are doing everything they can to give their daughters a strong foundation of self esteem.  However, they also realize their daughters are human and might make a mistake that would result in a pregnancy before they are ready to be mothers.  Now, it doesn’t matter what your overall, general concept of children is.  A woman who is forced to have a baby might perceive that child as punishment for their mistake.  You and I might call it god’s little gift, but she might have a totally different perspective.  We don’t need government in our homes.  If you believe a fetus is a human then that’s fine.  If you believe sperm is human life, more power to you.  But our national government should not be used as a tool to push other people’s beliefs down the nonbeliever’s throats.

The bottom line is that we are looking for a President that will confront an entire array of issues, not just the abortion issue.  If all it takes for some people to sleep at night is the fact that they have stopped a woman from exercising her right to choose what is best for her then these people would probably be more than happy to continue their lives under the leadership of President George Bush.  Mr. Bush will bend over backwards to save American babies.  But if that baby was born in Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan he or she can kiss his or her foreign baby-ass goodbye.  After all, collateral damage is expected in times of war.

I prefer my President to represent my views on a broad spectrum of issues.  And quite frankly I really don’t think meddling in a woman’s right to choose is the responsibility of the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, or myself.  We will spend a great deal of energy on the protection of the unborn while ignoring the cry of the children in our neighborhoods.

We will stand back and allow our children to be murdered by gangs of body armored, baton wielding, boot camp guards like the ones that murdered Martin Lee Anderson in that Florida boot camp.  We will allow our children to be punched in the face by mace spraying police for breaking curfew like Shelwanda Riley.  We will stand back and allow our government to turn its back on an entire city of children in need of help like the ones in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina destroyed their lives.  And I’m supposed to force a woman to bring a child into this world under these conditions.  Thanks, but no thanks on that abortion issue to nowhere.