Posted by
GFC on Sunday, October 11, 2009 12:00:00 AM
President Obama loves to say that he is willing to listen to opposition ideas, but then follows such statements with some variation of the idea that he won’t listen to the ideas that created the mess in which we now find ourselves. If you want to help clean up the mess you made, grab a mop. Don’t tell me how to use it. I don’t want those who created the mess telling me how to clean it up. Opposing ideas are dismissed without even the most cursory glance at their merits.
I would like to know which policies exactly are to blame. Even if every single thing that was done by President Bush was wrong can we at least have a list of those policies so we can distinguish between them and opposition ideas which were never implemented.
It may come as a surprise to the general population, but Republicans didn’t get to do everything they would have liked to during the Bush Presidency. Many of their policies were never tried. The Democrats had control of the House and Senate for two years, and shared control of the Senate for an additional year. Throughout the entire Bush Presidency, the Democrats in the Senate had enough members to mount filibusters to stop any legislation they wanted to stop.
So, before the President dismisses an idea as one that was tried and which failed, can we at least determine whether or not it was actually tried?
That is only the first step though. If the policy the president wishes to dismiss was tried, it does not follow that it was responsible the current mess. A great football team with a great game plan can still lose thanks to a couple of turnovers. Flawed execution of a great plan causes a loss. Should the plan be scrapped, or should the effort be to improve execution.
Even if a plan was actually followed, and it was executed to perfection, it still may not be the cause of a failure. Perhaps outside factors caused the problem. Let me return to football. If a team scores 50 points and loses, the problem probably isn’t the offense. Perhaps the defense needs a bit of work. An offense can score a touchdown on every possession and still lose, if the defense and special teams perform poorly enough.
What specific ideas are the proven failures? Was it tax cuts? I’ve never heard the president explain how tax cuts caused the recession. If he thinks they did cause the recession he should have raised taxes as one of his first priorities. Instead, the significant tax increases seem to be on hold until the economy is on a better footing.
Was it deficit spending? The president surely can’t think that was the problem given the fact that he thinks that deficit spending is the cure.
Was it a flawed health care system? Other nations with the sort of healthcare he advances suffered from the world wide downturn as well. And how exactly are the housing bubble, and related securities problems connected to health care? I am still waiting for the in depth analysis that shows health care is a root cause of the economic troubles of the past year.
It would be nice if the President would present arguments against specific ideas and proposals. He should explain how “bad” ideas were actual causes of the problems. He should be sure that those ideas were actually implemented and implemented well. He should describe how those ideas truly caused the problem showing that they weren’t just great ideas surrounded by unrelated flawed policies that doomed them to failure. Even once he has established all of this, he should listen to the counterpoints made by the other side. Perhaps they have an explanation he has missed. He should, but he won’t. He isn’t interested in truth, or prudent, reasoned analysis. He is simply interested in pushing his own ideas, and ignoring others.
Joe Wilson was right. The president does lie. He has no intention of listening to what the opposition says. He wants them to agree without question. He has no interest in understanding and examining their ideas.