My, Republicans, What Short Memories You Have...

I'm tired of listening to people condemn the Obama Administration's "government takeover" of American liberties. Sick of hearing ignorant, opportunistic candidates and talking heads paint Obama like a foreign dictator and call him the worst president in history. Anyone can see Obama's off to a rough start (that's what happens when you inherit four generations worth of problems) but to claim he's the worst in history you must either have little to no knowledge of American political history (see: Buchanan, Harding, A. Johnson, etc) or you must be willing to say anything to fuel the flames of a rabid voting bloc motivated by pent-up frustration, some legitimate and some scary, in order to get elected.

The aforementioned presidents were really bad. Obama's only been in office for two years, so it's pretty difficult and stupid to compare him to these guys. But if you're dying to compare him to someone, you don't have to look that far back to find one worse than Obama: George W. Bush did more to intrude on the daily lives of Americans, expand the powers of the executive branch and trample on the Constitution than most self-proclaimed neocons with daddy issues could ever hope to do. This is what amazes me about Republicans in 2010: their dissatisfaction with the current administration has apparently led them to block the previous eight years out of their collective memory in a pathetically transparent attempt to regain power at any cost. And it just might work.

But where were these proponents of conservative government spending when Bush led us into a war that ended up costing almost a trillion dollars? Where were these ardent defenders of the Constitution when Bush, Cheney et al were treating it like last Sunday's funny pages? Why wasn't the Tea Party formed after Bush turned executive orders and signing statements into de facto legislation and gave his cronies the authority to subvert limitations on presidential powers that had been almost universally recognized for over 200 years yet simultaneously avoid oversight in the name of executive privilege?

I'll be the first to admit Obama has racked up some pretty hefty additions to our deficit, but he did so in the course of fixing problems that most people agreed needed to be fixed (if healthcare and finance reform are "disasters" now, what the hell were they before???) in amounts that are equivalent to or less than the debt we would have incurred had we continued down our pre-recession road. The voters spoke in 2008: Obama was elected to reform industries that had proven themselves to be failures and in need of reform. And even though many of these same voters are now deserting Obama as he gets his hands dirty and we are forced to accept the painful but inevitable consequences of our behavior, the guy is sticking to his message and doing what he was elected to do. As he should.

It'd be one thing if Republicans were offering any specific, constructive ideas other than "undoing the damage" inflicted by Obama's "socialist agenda," but they aren't. That's an advantage exclusively granted to the opposition: it's easy to point to current negative socioeconomic indicators as a reason for change (Dems did it in '08) but much more difficult to prove things would have been worse had they been done differently. Regardless, now is the time for a united front. And it seems to me that the Republican congressional leadership's sole focus is on doing whatever it takes to regain the majority, even if it means pandering to the vocal fringes of its party and putting the entire country back on the path that led us into this mess in the first place.