Politics... Pshh!!

Each day I hear about how amazing he is. How he is going to save us all. How life is going to be so good with him. How he is what we need.

The man being referred to here is not the One who has the power to save us. He is a mere man. He is a man who was elected by the people of this country to be our leader. The man is Barrack Obama. As our leader, he does deserve our prayers. However, what is with the showers of praise this man is receiving? I am so sick of hearing about how terrible of a president we had in office prior to Obama and how great these first few days of the new administration has been. And when they do make a mistake – “Well it's because of how bad Bush was.”

Take for example the fact that in the first 60+ days of his rule Obama and the congress that was elected (primarily on the “Anti-Bush” vote) has spent more than most 4 year periods in American history. “That’s because Bush caused this recession.” I’m sure that one man caused a WORLD WIDE recession. Every economy on the globe is struggling right now, with the possible exception of China (which we can’t be sure about them because they may be struggling and just not reporting it). I’m sure that George W. Bush woke up one day after being elected, and said, “I want to destroy the world.” The proceeded to systematically fly planes into buildings, cause a couple of hurricanes, start two wars, cause flooding, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, and heat waves. He called up OPEC and said, “Hey, we want you to charge enough for a barrel of oil that gas will cost $5” and OPEC being the pushover’s they are listened. He went to millions of the lower-middle class earners and told them to take out sub-prime mortgages that charge ridiculous interest rates that adjusted so they couldn’t make the payments. Then he went to a number of people who owned a house and told them to buy another before selling their current house. His plan came to fruition and most of those people lost their houses and the banks we in danger of folding. He also talked to credit card companies and had them enact the Universal Default Provision written into their card agreements. Many people were paying 20% or more on stuff that they couldn’t afford. It was all part of his master plan. He decided to give the auto companies bad marketing plans. He decided to have the media convince society that we are in the middle of a recession and that any spending that is done is out of line. Finally, his plan was complete and not just the country, but the whole world was in economic ruin.

All of the blame has been placed on a single man – an unfair burden by any standard. Bush was far from perfect, but he did find the time each day to pray – and that was the biggest reason there was a target on his back. Bush had too much respect for the office to fight back to his attacks and just took it in stride – a noble thing indeed. His successor has already fought back twice in his first 60 days.

First of all, a little defense of Bush. Bush had absolutely no affect on the weather, natural disasters, or anything related to the environment. He could have tried to stop Global Warming (incidentally, in his time in office, the average temperature of the world actually dropped by almost a tenth of a degree). He did not prompt a terrorist group who hates free enterprise, freedom, and everything that the United States stands for to fly planes into buildings taking the lives of hundreds of Americans. For what its worth, these terrorists have staged attacks in England, Spain, and various other parts of the free world, and Bush wasn’t the president there. The leaders of OPEC let their greed lead them to try to suck every penny they could out of the good citizens of the world and by cutting production of oil down to nearly nothing they raised the demand on the lessened supply. The WORLDWIDE price increase was in no way tied to Bush. He implemented programs to try to find renewable energy. What came of that? Complaints because the price of corn went up, the price of meat soon followed, and milk soon after that. However, when we cut our foreign dependence, prices returned to reasonable rates. Also, opening oil fields where the only negative effect is making caribou walk around pipeline towers helped to give us some of our own oil to get us through to times when better vehicles will exist.
After the 9/11 attacks, Bush started a war of vengeance in Afghanistan. He sought Osama Bin Laden and some sort of vengeance for the attacks which cut this country to the core. Bush, with approval from the Senate, launched these offensives which, though it took a while, lead to the United States capturing a number of enemies of freedom and largely removing terrorists from Afghanistan. Months later, Saddam Hussein kept defying orders to cease developing Weapons of Mass Destruction and allow the United Nations to inspect their research facilities. In a stare down, Bush moved to end, what CIA intelligence said was a huge operation producing WMDs. The US army attacked Iraq and found mass graves and was able to overtake Iraq in a matter of weeks. However, the WMDs were not found. High ranking military officials are convinced that these weapons were migrated out of Iraq in a large convoy that left just before US forces reached Baghdad. Its funny how this war has become the “downfall” of the Bush administration, though since we entered Iraq there has not been a single attack of foreign terrorism on US soil when we had been having one every 2-3 years. When you have them on the run, the best strategy is to quit, right? Well, that is what our President offered as part of his platform.

People downgrade Bush because of all the spending while he was in office. It was a lot and I don't personally agree with all of it, but it is important to note that the President doesn't really have much, if anything, to do with the budget. It is determined by the Senate, if I remember correctly: a Senate which has been Democratic majority for at least 4 years, a period in which spending has sky rocketed. Granted a lot of the spending was heading to Iraq, but congress salaries were raised, as well as programs put in place spending a lot more than needed. Yet, this is actually being completely blamed on Bush - go figure.

People have gone completely overboard in spending lately (a trend that has found its way to Washington). People are buying “toys” that they can’t afford or trying to live outside their means in a house that is half their take-home pay, driving a car that is worth their annual income, watching a TV that is wider than they are tall, and justifying all of these things as “needs”. They put their living expenses on credit cards and when they can’t afford credit card payments, they put those on another card. Then the card companies enact the Universal Default Provision which bumps their interest rate over 20%. They buy boats, jet skis, motorcycles, ATVs, and countless toys they could live without. They have to have the latest fashions in clothes, the best cell phone (or iPhone, or Blackberry, or…), the best computer, and the biggest cable package for their TV. They have to have letters like DVR, DVD, and HD-TV, WI-Fi, X-Box, PS3, Wii, and iPods. All of this stuff is E-X-T-R-A and keeps them from what is really important – spending time with their spouse and kids.

This brings me to my next point. Our society seems to think of kids as a burden. In his campaign, President Obama referred to his daughters being burdened with an unwanted child. It has to make them feel good that either of them might have been a "burden" to their parents, but given the current laws they couldn't be killed. Bush – a good Christian – was strictly Pro-Life. He believed that from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, you are a HUMAN BEING. Imagine that – you are a person when you are conceived, when you are born, when you are 2, when you get your drivers license, when you are old enough to vote, when you are old enough to drink, when you are working, when you are retired, when you are 90+, and when you are laying there on your death bed minutes from meeting your Maker. We are all endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights (see the Declaration of Independence) which include Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. You cannot tell me that there are not at least some of the 3,700 innocent children who are aborted each day would chose to not give up that UNALIENABLE right to life. As for the elderly, our new administration will be moving more toward a trend that says, “You are not valuable enough to society. The $25,000 it would take to keep you alive for one year is more than the $20,000 the government thinks you are worth. You are the weakest link, Goodbye. As Pope John Paul II once said, “A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.” It is interesting because this weak link in the chain of society is still better than no link at all. If there is no link in between, the chain separates. When a link is weak, the links around it need to support it and help it out as much as they can. If we fail to support these links, we end up a broken society. The elderly, the unborn, the sick, and those with special needs – they are just as valuable to this society as any other person.

We are all part of the Body of Christ. Look at the human body for example. I have 10 fingers and NONE of them can hear. I have two ears that work perfectly, but they cannot see. It is because just as God designed each part of our body with a specific purpose, just like each of us has a specific purpose, created by God, as a part of the Body of Christ. By cutting off an ear, the body suffers. Though it does not die (typically), it is not as strong as it could have been with that ear. Much the same is a baby who is aborted (or murdered if you will) or an elderly person who is struggling to hold on who is euthanized (also murdered).

So I invite people to STOP blaming Bush for every problem. If your life is messed up, there is only one person to blame, and he doesn’t speak with a southern accent (unless of course you do). The good news is that the same person that messed everything up is the one person who can straighten everything out. We are on the verge of something big – something truly huge and we don’t know what is about to hit us. We can only hope that Abraham Lincoln was right when he said. “It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.” Let us not be fooled by the media and the politicians telling us what they want us to believe and skewing the facts to advance their opinions. When we next go to the ballot box, maybe it is time to tell Washington and our local leaders that we are sick of outrageous spending and that we are ready for our representatives to start representing us.

Sorry for the rant – now I’m back to my mission…