Third Term For Bush

So, we find ourselves in the third term of George W. Bush. What you say? Isn’t a third term Constitutionally prohibited? Didn’t Obama win? You mean we are still a racist nation? Yes, yes, and haven’t been for decades. I am talking about the amazing continuity that has been maintained from the end of the Bush administration and the advent of the One. The Obama campaign did not win by campaigning against John McCain. The entire message was ‘we are not Bush, everything Bush has done was wrong, we are not going to do the same things, in fact we are going reverse everything Bush has done.’ So how has this all been going? As George Will is fond of saying…..Well.

The major Bush mistake-cum-crime was the War on Terror particularly in Iraq. OK, he changed the name to “overseas contingency operations”. But what’s in a name? There have been no policy changes. The date for final pullout agreed to by Bush with the Iraqi government remains the same. The policy of that date being extended if facts on the ground warrant is still there. The next loudest shrieks about Bush policy that Obama promised to end, were directed at W’s handling of captured “enemy combatants’. Whoops, I mean “detainees” the second huge Bush rollback. The remaining policies toward captured terrorists (I am in thrall to no man) including renditions and closing Guantanamo Bay have been decried by Obama as President, but changed not a whit. Candidate Obama also piled on the criticism of Bush’s national security apparatus, I never heard him say ‘Constitution shredding’, but he didn’t seem to be shy about bringing it up. And yet, since 1/20/2009 no policies regarding wiretaps, intercepts or altering the Patriot Act have been adopted or even put forward.

On the domestic front, all we heard from the Democrats as a party and Obama as a candidate was that Bush was a budget busting, deficit ballooning spendthrift who never lifted a veto pen (mostly true about the pen). Yet Obama in creating more red ink in four months than Bush did in eight years not only doesn’t seem to be reversing W’s policy, his trebling of the deficit seems to be an enthusiastic endorsement of his predecessor.

Even inside the White House the Bush template is still in use. In the family quarters the children’s areas are still occupied by two attractive young girls.

So except for a couple of semantic changes and other small alterations like the nationalization of the auto and banking industries (which may be becoming a habit) not much has been overthrown. So far when Obama looks in the mirror, I think W’s visage is staring back.