Today Barrack Obama is sworn in as our new president. I can't help but ask one crucial question:
What is the big deal?
I can understand that people had their issues with Bush. He wasn't perfect. But he did what I'm sure he felt was the best he could with the cards he was dealt. Look at Iraq objectively. Any conflict on a global scale, the US is going to be criticized for it. Either we poked our noses in where it didn't belong (Vietnam, Iraq) or we didn't stop something that we could've stopped (Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and various other African conflicts). From what I can see, Bush felt Iraq would turn into the latter, when in reality it became the former. But with the war in Iraq we tend to forget one crucial thing: the President of the United States does not have absolute power. If the majority of Congress wanted to prevent the troops from originally entering Iraq, they could have. So why does the President get all the blame when it goes wrong?
Also, Bush was definitely not the ideal man for the job. But in each election, he was vastly superior to the alternatives. Gore and Kerry would not have done any better in Bush's stead. If the Democrats really wanted to get rid of Bush in 2004, they should've picked someone better. And all you have to look at is the Inconvient Bullcrap of Al Gore to see what kind of job he would have done.
Next, there is no reason to assume things will get better under Obama. It's a coin toss really. There is no evidence or reasoning to suggest how that man will do in the position of President. Without the administrative experience, it could go either way. It could turn out fantastic and a few years down the road I could end up being proud of having Obama as a president. I genuinely hope that it does. However, it could also go downhill from here and only get worse. Granted, odds are it will get worse before it can get better, but will that really be the doing of the President? Everything is based on his wonderous speeches. But right now, that's all they are. Words. Nothing more. It is time for Obama to prove that he can walk the walk as well as talk the talk because even though the country is expecting great things from him, this faith is based on his words alone.
I'm not naive enough to think that by next year he will have proven himself. But if there has not been significant progress towards the kind of change that our country needs by the next election (4 years), I seriously urge voters to reconsider their faith in that man.
Anyway, that's my inauguration day rant. I know few people actually read this, but I welcome comments, critiques, corrections, etc. Please be civil if you do.
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2 comments:
I found this opinion in the Deseret News to be interesting:
"One day we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, insisting that people be judged on the "content of their character." The next day we celebrate the inauguration of a president solely based on "the color of his skin."
Few see the irony.
For political mileage, Obama identified with his black father who abandoned him, not his white mother or maternal grandparents who raised him. The media act like fools, fawning over Obama like giggling school girls. Meanwhile, Obama's pride blinds him to the reality that he's being patronized because of his race."
The 2008 election was all about race and earlier on gender. Honestly, if Obama had been white, Hilary would have been the candidate for the Democrats. Like wise, had Hilary been a man in addition to a white Obama, the election might have actually been about the issues at hand, not on "how far we've come in electing a *insert applicable hypothetical minority here*"
Every single time I heard someone say something along the lines of "how appropriate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is celebrated right before a black president is inaugurated" my response was "yeah, he's turning in his grave." If, as a country, all we can focus on is "how far we've come" by electing a black man, then we have gone far. In the wrong direction.
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