MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

5/7/09

There is a theory circulating among those who normally think much like I do that the sole purpose of the Obama administration appears to be to make the former administration look good. Such thinking is ludicrous for two reasons:

--Even if President Obama were the messianic figure come to bring sweetness, light, and wisdom to the benighted masses that his most loyal acolytes, including CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC, seem to suppose, even if he were some reincarnation of Moses, he could not make the Bush administration look good. Getting the government’s finances in order, bringing some kind of coherency and reason to American foreign policy, turning around our doomed, ramshackle economy, parting the Red Sea, even if our new president had a desire to do any of these things, would be easy compared to making Bush/Cheney anything but the tragic, perhaps game ending blunder that it was.

--The worse the Obama administration does, the worse Bush looks. Why? Because without Bush’s bumbling incompetence, consummate arrogance, crass stupidity, and/or worse, we never would have had Obama as our president.

More conventionally, I am still willing, perhaps hoping against hope, to give our young president a chance. He’s smart, adaptable, and from Chicago. He wants to succeed. And he’s not George Bush.