A Defense of Bush

During the first six years of George Bush's presidency, America prospered.  During the last two years, we experienced a harsh decline, that accelerated even faster over the next few years after he left office.  So, because the decline began during his term, it MUST have been his fault, right?

I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that.

You see, the President does not have complete power.  In fact, he is just one aspect of the federal government. In fact, when the congress is against him, he's actually over-powered by them.

For example, during Clinton's term, he was out numbered.  He began his presidency acting very liberally, doing things like trying to enact universal healthcare.  However, he could accomplish very little due to his being outnumbered.  It's a good thing.  We have a system that prevents the President from being able to do whatever he wants throughout his entire term by giving the people the opportunity to have him outnumbered every two years.  But I digress.  It was clear that he could not enforce his agenda, so he took a more conservative approach by giving in, mostly to Newt Gingrich, and doing things like cutting spending, and balancing the budget.

By 2006, Bush was outnumbered 2-1, and was forced to cooperate with liberals in order to get anything done.  Things like bailouts, and stimulus packages, and expansion of wasteful government programs.  These led to huge damages to our economy.  After Obama took office, he then amplified these things by enacting them in a much bigger way.  But that's another story altogether.

But Bush took us into an illegal war, using lies to justify!  Also not true.  Not one law was broken in order go to war.  All congressional approval necessary was given, and even voted on by many of the liberal politicians condemning it.  And no lies were told in order to go to war.  False intelligence does not mean that it was a lie, it just means that it turned out to be wrong.  It happens.  In fact, during Bill Clinton's term, he strongly advocated that we go to war with Iraq, because of WMD's.  As did MANY democrats, whom after the fact, suddenly act as though they were against it from the start.  It's like when a bunch of kids are playing around, knock over a lamp, and then all but one of them jump away from the lamp, and then point their fingers at the one.

Neither of these things, however, are what caused the collapse that we're facing now. It predates Obama, and it predates Bush.  It even predates the first Bush.  In fact, it goes all the way back to Jimmy Carter.

The real cause of the collapse was the Community Reinvestment Act.  If you don't know about it, research it.  Read the actual act.  Signing this into law guaranteed the eventual collapse of the housing market, and thus, everything else.

The Community Reinvestment Act forces banks to give loans to people who cannot necessarily afford them. In order to comply, a certain percentage of loans had to be given to those in lower income brackets. What this meant is that even if the vast majority of people in a certain income bracket were considered huge risks, it didn't matter.  If these banks wanted to stay in business, they had to grant a certain number of loans regardless of risk.  When a person with a high lending risk takes out a loan to buy a house, then the risk is that they will default.  Banks can't afford to just buy houses for people, so they are inevitable forced to foreclose on the home, which costs more money than it does to have a lender that makes their payments.

This law was then amplified over the next few decades by liberal politicians, like the Clintons and Janet Reno.

This resulted a large housing bubble.  Hundreds of thousands homes were being purchased, that otherwise would not have been.  This was the housing boom that we experienced a few years ago.  It was a great deal for many for a short period of time.  Houses were being built all across the country, and home values were at an all time high.

But, it was artificial, and doomed to implode.

Inevitably, a few short years into the artificial boom, hundreds of thousands of homes were defaulted on, forcing banks into issuing foreclosures.  Now you have way more homes than you have homeowners.  Hundreds of thousands of empty homes.  Supply and demand forces the value of these homes down, since there is a far greater supply than demand.  Now even those who can afford to keep their homes owe far more than their homes are worth to begin with.  People all over the country lost astronomical amounts of money in their real estate investments, damaging companies, which eventually led to fewer jobs, as everything began to collapse.

Bush didn't destroy the economy.  If you want to blame someone, blame Jimmy Carter.  Blame Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Blame Janet Reno.  Bush's hands are clean on this one.

The "Slander" against Obama and the DNC

My last blog detailed the slander against Romney, and why it was false.  Now, I'll focus on facts about Obama that liberals have claimed was merely slander, and detailing why it is in fact true.  

Disclaimer:  The original plan for this plan was to research on liberal pages for examples of this slander, however, I can't seem to find a whole lot of specific examples, so many of these will just have to be negative facts.  (It is interesting that it was so much easier for me to find specific examples of slander against Romney and the RNC, but incredibly difficult to find specific examples of slander against Obama.  I would speculate that this is due to a lack of actual slander, and is perpetuated by nothing more than when negative things are said against Obama, that his supporters can only be responded with by saying it's not true, and further debate would only prove that it were true, or at least likely true.  If these things were true, and those that were educated on the subject knew they were true, they would avoid mentioning them like the plague, even to dispute them.  It's would be far easier to make a blanket accusation that there is a lot of slander out there without specifying where, and keeping conversations on the subject as short as possible.)

Let's start with his famous "You didn't build that" speech.  There are two claims.  One is that he never said that.  Not true.  I heard it.

So, as you can see, he clearly said exactly what people are saying he said. 

The other claim is that it was taken out of context.  Also not true.  I just posted him elaborating on what he meant.  He explained how you don't deserve credit for your success because government provided great teachers, roads and bridges, and the internet.  He elaborated on how government was the reason that you were able to succeed.  He didn't talk about how these businesses give that government the money to hire teachers, build and maintain bridges and roads, etc.  Government can't accomplish anything without funds provided by these businesses.  It's quite the contrary.  If a government is successful, it didn't get their on it's own.  It got their on the backs of it's people.  But I digress.  I've already proven that he both said it, and meant it.  If you want a further argument on how this speech was so wrong, I'll be doing a blog more specific to the subject at a later time.

I've heard it claimed that it isn't true that Obama slashed medicare to pay for Obamacare.  This is most definitely true.  Over the next ten years, it cuts $716 billion from medicare, and that still doesn't come close to covering the costs of Obamacare, which he claimed wouldn't cost anything.  Although, to be fair, most of this doesn't cut current spending, but rather slows the increase in the budget, but the claim that Obamacare cuts $716 biillion from medicare over the next 10 years is absolutely true.

Obama supporters like to refute the claim the unemployment is way out of control as slander as well.  They're wrong on a few levels.  When Bush left office, unemployment was at 7.8%.  Today, it is at 8.1%, and that certainly isn't the peak.  I can go further than this, though.  368,000 workers have left the work force since Obama took office.  This means that some amount of those have given up hope in ever finding a job.  If you adjust the numbers, and add 368,000 workers back into the workforce, we actually have unemployment over 11%. So, not only is unemployment higher now than when Obama took office, if you count that people that just gave up hope, it's astronomically higher.

There's the famous "this economy is bad because Obama inherited it, and it's not his fault".  Really?  You're still saying that?  It's been nearly four years, and growth is horrible.  When Reagan was president, he was creating 500,000 jobs a month, and he was doing it by promoting small businesses.  Obama creating 80,000 jobs by spending astronomical amounts of money, often costing millions per job, and there are still fewer jobs today than there were when he took office.  

There's been a report that Obama is the smallest spender since Eisenhower.  This report uses skewed data to come up with this, and this should be obvious to any objective person.  Our debt has nearly doubled in less than four years, so to suggest he's somehow spending less is ridiculous.  This report counts things like war spending, which is generally not intended to be spent, it's there just in case.  I believe it was Rush Limbaugh (I don't care if you like the man or not, focus on the point here) that said it's like putting enough money in your budget to buy a brand new car every year, even though you intend to keep the same care for ten years.  If you keep the same car for ten years, it doesn't mean that you cut all that money out of your budget, since you never really intended to spend it.  it's there just in case.  It wasn't an amazing feat that you didn't spend your "just in case" money.  Previous presidents were not given credit for not spending that money, only Obama.

The Slander Against Romney (And the RNC)

I recently heard that Obama is the most slandered man of all time, by someone claiming truth as slander.  Since liberals are claiming this, I thought I'd go ahead and point out all the slander that I'm hearing about Romney and the RNC, both from the Obama campaign, and the ridiculous statements floating around the blogosphere and facebook.

Let's start with the claim that Romney's slogan is identical to a slogan used by the KKK in the early 1920's.  Whatever jackass came up this is actually quite clever.  The claim is that Romney uses the slogan "Keep America American", and that the KKK used the slogan as well in the 1920's.  This is half true.  Just not the first half.  This slogan was used by the KKK, but these words never came out of Romney's mouth, much less used as his slogan.  The genius in this is that if someone wanted to double check this, they are more likely to double check whether or not the KKK said it, which they would find that they did, and then only assume that Romney said it.

Since we're on the subject of this particular piece of slander, let's give credit where credit is due.  The credit belongs to a very liberal media.  I have confirmed that at the very least, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both reported that he said this, and then later issued a retraction, but the problem with this is far fewer people see the retraction than there are that see the story.  Front page stories are rarely retracted on the front page, networks that broadcast stories on TV most often issue retractions on the net rather than on TV, etc.

Romney did say something close to this, but it's meaning couldn't be further.  What he said was that the current president is transforming the United States into a European Style government, and that he believed we should "Keep America America".  As in not transform the United States into Europe, but stick with the style that has made America great.  One letter makes all the difference.

If anyone has further questions on this, feel free to comment.  Otherwise, let's move on.  Let's focus on Romney giving a steel worker's wife cancer.  This one is quite the stretch.  The claim is that after Romney took away his health insurance, that his wife got cancer.  After months of treatment, she died, and he was stuck with the bill.  Here's the actual order of events.  Romney worked for Bain Capitol.  Romney left Bain Capitol to help save the Olympics.  Later on, after Romney left, his health benefits were dropped.  Three years after that, his wife also lost her insurance.  That's right, even after that, she was still insured anyways.  They didn't get private health insurance.  Then, after all this, she got cancer, and didn't make it.  Then, the Romney campaign used her death to attack shamelessly attack Romney.

Next item.  The claim that the RNC was devoid of minorities.  I actually love this claim, because it's so easy to flip around.  It's actually pretty solid proof of NBC's extreme bias.  Liberals think that there were no minorities, because when they watched the RNC on NBC, they didn't see any.  This is because NBC cut off coverage of the event every single time that a minority spoke.  There were actually several.  But liberals would never know, because their networks refused to cover it.  This is disgusting, and should never be tolerated.

There's also the clam that Romney is a felon.  This is based on a single phone call by an anonymous person with no evidence that said he was a felon.  We have no idea who this person is, whether or not this person is credible, or if he has ever even met Romney to begin with.  One single person who can't be named makes a phone call to make the claim.  No evidence.  Not just no damning evidence, there isn't even circumstantial evidence.  It's impossible to disprove evidence that doesn't exist.  For all we know, it was this guy here on a pay phone.

Possible one that should be considered the most offensive, particularly by blacks, is the democrat's claim that they have been fighting for civil rights for over 200 years, presumably against the republicans. If more people were further educated in their history rather than what uneducated celebrities told them, they would know how false this is.  It's the exact opposite.  Republicans have been fighting AGAINST democrats for over 200 years in the name of civil rights.  Democrats supported slavery.  Democrats wrote the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks segregated.  Democrats are the reason Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus.  Of the civil rights laws that were voted on, the average amount of democrats to vote against them was about 82%, whereas the average amount of republicans to vote for them was about 98%.  In short, without republicans, there would still be separate water fountains.

There's the claim that the Romney/Ryan medicare plan would force seniors to change their lives and use the voucher system.  This claim is ridiculous, and could only made by someone who doesn't know what the plan is to begin with, or is just plain lying.  Paul Ryan has clearly stated far before this accusation was made that seniors should not be forced to change their lives because of government's mistakes, and therefore no senior citizen would be forced to change.  Senior citizens that don't want to change their healthcare can remain in the exact same program with the exact same coverage that they already have.  The only ones affected are future generations.  With the way we're going now, healthcare won't exist period, and it's proven.  Coverage isn't being cut, the system would just change, and it's clear that something has to change, or we'll lose it entirely.  However, Obama has raided billions from medicare to pay for Obamacare, then claims that Romney wants to throw Granny over a cliff.

Then the claim that republicans want to prevent women from getting healthcare.  What's happening is that they don't want to force people to provide something that is against their moral conscience, regardless of whether or not they agree with those morals.  No woman is denied contraceptives.   If you work in a place that doesn't provide contraceptives, and it's important to you that you don't have to use your own $5, you have the option of a new job.  With the other plan, if you don't want to provide something that goes against your conscience, your only option is to shut down, all so someone doesn't have to spend a couple bucks of their own money, and doesn't have to switch jobs.  Nobody is trying to force the ACLU into providing free bibles, or Islamic organizations into providing free bacon, or the Obama campaign into free Romney/Ryan bumper stickers.  Nobody is trying to outlaw contraceptives, despite how liberals are spinning this.

I could go on and on and on, but this is already ridiculously long.  I've shown you where the slander against Romney is actually false.  In a little bit here, I'll do a separate blog on how the things that the left calls slander against Obama are in fact, true.