The reason people hated the earmarks in the Bush years was that they were a sign of corrupt, out-of-control pork barrel spending of his administration. There was a great deal of agitation, and people hated Bush all the more for earmarks passed by Congress.
The rescue bill is the largest pork project in the history of the solar system. The outcry against earmarks started as an outcry against out-of-control pork-barrel spending. Earmarks were simply symbolic of what was wrong.
The outcry against earmarks devolved into a buzzword. As the left has an iron clad grip on the press and schools, one need simply change the process of spending so that it is not labeled "earmark" and politicians can live on without so much as a token nod to the cause that spawned the anti-earmark anger.
The earmark problem was actually quite interesting. An earmark is government spending directly by Congress that bypasses the administration.
One would only see an explosion of earmarks when there is an administration that this trying to clamp down on out of control spending. One should not expect to see earmarks with a president who is a spend thrift, as an administration looking to dramatically increase the size of the Federal government would want to bring all spending into the administration.
Obama seems to have scored big with the earmark feint. It might backfire. To historians, it might show that the Bush administration was trying to cut spending, and that Congress was the source of much of the economic malfeasance.
4 comments:
Yes, because that Iraq war thing was (and still is) a bargain!
We don't know how history will judge things. When everyone was ringing the war bell during the shock and awe campaign, people thought history would judge the war an unqualified triumph.
Today we find that the Democrats won a super majority based solely upon hatred of Bush and are pushing through agendas based on vacuous word games.
People who are overwraught with Bush Derangement and who share the Marxist worldview are bowled over with the cleverness of it all.
Historians may judge the events differently. They may actually see a manufactured
Historians, who know that the Congress hold the purse strings of the country will see the US economy crashed two years after the Congress changed hands. They will see that a very large number of progressives, like Soros, Madoff, and the Sandlers were engaged in unprecedented financial manipulations and they will see a large numbers of Democrats cheating on their taxes.
Just as the people who thought the war would be praised by historians, progressives might be wrong in their opinion about how Obama's monosyllabic campaign followed by a socialist's slight of hand may not be judged well by history.
Who knows, the final page in Iraq is not yet written. The primary villain in Iraq is still Hussein. Let's see, he had a war with Iran that killed about 8 million. He invated Kuwait. During the Clinton years he killed about 500,000 people and trained a terrorist army.
Bush foolishly invaded the country. Hussein's terrorist army and the terrorists funded by Iran then proceeded to kill another half million people.
Bush's foolishness is widely acknowledged, we don't know how the world will judge the war in the long run. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Iran are all having elections.
Jason, I have read a number of your posts here and other places. You are very good at fomenting hatred.
We don't know what will happen.
Wow, that's quite a reaction!
"Fomenting hatred"? I hate very few actually. To be honest, I almost feel bad for Bush (as I believe he was just foolish enough to be mislead by several advisers early on).
But more to the point, it's fairly telling that this would be your reaction to my point that the Iraq War was not cheap. Someone points out a FACT to you, and you launch into a litany that is not only error filled, infactual, and intellectually dishonest, but also summed up by a personal attack against someone who's intentions you could not possibly know. Tp tale such a comment personally enough eludes to an insecurity of conception (i.e. lack of faith in your own reasoning) that I think is justified, based on the logical holes in the original post.
I point this out only so that you might one day understand why you are, and shall remain, ill-informed.
Do better by yourself. Or, if you cannot handle the intersection of differing ideas, stop posting your thoughts online.
The post you responded to wasn't about Iraq. Your post was simply a blatant propagandist ploy to make negative associations with a political enemy.
I've found hundreds of posts dropped by your account of this same basic form. If I've stumbled onto a hundred, it is likely that you are repeating this action thousands of times.
When one finds hundreds of posts from the same account with the same form, then it is proper to conclude that the posts are part of a calculated effort.
Now, lets think of a word to describe a cold calculated effort ...
The mechanics of the whisper campaign has been known since antiquity. The people who wrote the Book of Genesis had the whispering snake as the spreader of division and discord.
The hard part is figuring out how to disfuse whisper campaigns.
As your comment had nothing to do with the post but is simply part of a calculated effort, I decided to comment on the effort. It is not a reaction to a single comment, but a reaction to several hundred comments of the same form.
BTW, ending your second post with contemptuous pity doesn't really defend your position. Contempt, after all, is just one of the many manifestations of the h word.
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