Missing In Action

What does it tell you about the Republican choice last time around?

I just finished watching the talking heads on every channel in Iowa this morning. Since nobody seems to really have a clue as to who's really up and who's really down, they're dragging up every indicator they can find, no matter how small and insignificant.

Except one.

Nobody has even mentioned the name, George W. Bush. (Or Cheney, or Rumsfeld, or anybody in that entire administration.) This is unprecedented! Not even Nixon was so thoroughly discarded after his term in office. I feel like I'm living in the novel 1984! This was the immediately previous Republican administration. They ran this country for eight long years. Where are they?

Every last one of them has crawled under their respective rocks, that's where they are. I read just a few comments here on the Vine that suggested that Bush was not the worst thing that has happened to this country, so I reprinted my "Top Ten Evils of Bush" essay that I wrote just after President Obama's victory in 2008. The massive silence about Bush now is actually something to celebrate. That silence roars, "Bush was a horrible failure!"

The banner headline that should be out there is, "Republicans are ashamed of what they did to us!" It should be, but it isn't. So the takeaway for the nation should be, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Because these are the same failed ideas that were used to sell Bush to us. They didn't work then and they won't work now.

The knock on Obama is that he hasn't worked miracles. I'll accept that. He hasn't. I'm frustrated too.

... however ...

• It takes more than just a few years to undo the massive damage done by Bush.
• We elected a moderate who tried to compromise. We knew that when we elected him.

The one mistake ... and I'm not sure that "mistake" is really the right word ... that can be laid at President Obama's door is that he didn't use the first two years to dismantle and destroy the opposition. That's what some of the people who elected him wanted. (Me included, actually.) But "my way or the highway" politics is what Bush did and that isn't Obama's way. The Party of No in Congress has obstructed every initiative, every solution, every effort to find common ground.

The solution now is to give Obama a Congress that he can work with.