One of the reasons I went into my blogging funk for the past several months was the impending doom which was the Bush re-election. Fortunately, to this point, Bush has proven that his re-election was not a harbringer of doom, but rather of incompetence.
Not to say that this administration’s incompetence hasn’t done some very bad things for the country. We’re still stuck in a quagmire in Iraq with no hopes of getting out. Katrina was so badly mismanaged that undoubtedly hundreds more people died than had to, and tens of thousands suffered significantly more than they should have.
And there have been some rather “doomy” components to this administration - the bankruptcy bill threatens to plunge thousands of people into permanent poverty due to things such as unforseen medical expenses. We are likely to have two new Supreme Court justices (we already have one) who will sign-off on the President’s view that he (and his successors) become virtual emperors in time of war. And then there’s the deficit - it isn’t going away any time soon.
But all in all, if I would have been told that Bush would have been defeated on Social Security, have his tax-cut agenda put on the backburner, have poll numbers in the upper 30s, be on the verge of having most of his party’s top officials indicted, and thereby be a virtual lame duck less than a year into his second term, I suspect I would have been overjoyed last November.
For now, I’m just relieved, and hope that 2006 will be the beginning of the end of the nightmare which has been the Bush Presidency.
