MAYBE WE SHOULD LOOK BACK

As the news stories keep piling up, I continue to wait for the Main Stream Media to point out what I think is obvious; the Bush administration will haunt us for years to come.

Let's look at some of the more glaring examples. 

A deep water oil drilling rig blows up, kills 11 workers, sinks and starts spewing oil and gas into the Gulf. And then we find out that the Federal Regulators performed fewer and fewer inspections each year as the Bush administration was in office.

A coal mine blows up right here in Wild and Wonderful West Virginia. 29 miners die and we find out that the Federal Regulators, under the Bush administration, did inspections without follow-up and fined the mine operators pennies on the dollar.

As the entire financial system teetered on the edge of a complete meltdown in September of 2008, the Bush administration presented to Congress the infamous TARP bailout. Only now do we discover that it was the Federal Regulators in the Bush administration who dropped the ball and never saw the meltdown coming. Oh ya, and they surfed porn at work while Wall Street burned. Very Roman of them.

I could go on. Katrina and FEMA. Madoff and the SEC. There not only seems to be a pattern here, there's a damn pattern here! The administration of the 43rd President should, and I hope will, go down in history as raising incompetence to a new high. Why did this happen?

The conservatives and neocons who came into power on January 20, 2001, were, I believe, dedicated to the Ronald Reagan pronouncement, "Government is the problem." Because of that belief, they under funded important regulatory agencies. They made a point of hiring not from the Ivy League but from the likes of Liberty U. and Patrick Henry College. Being a crony of someone in or near the administration was more important than ability and loyalty was more important that talent. The general feeling, I think, was that either the agencies in question weren't all that important to what the Bushies wanted to do or that an incompetent agency was easier to eliminate or curtail. Government is the problem, remember. And looking back to the Bush years we see that, son of a gun, they're right!

Obama says that he wants to look forward. All right, he and his administration can look forward, but I, for one, will continue to look back to the rolling mess that will spawn problems for years and decades to come.

Let's see, torture, gutting the constitution, misrepresenting us into war, unfunded drug benefit.....