Comparing George Bush’s 8 years against the 18 months of Mr. Obama is intersting, because it seems to me that Mr. Obama has demonstrated that one can pack 8 years worth of incompetence and poor judgment into 18 months. Certainly that is so measured purely by the budget deficits run up by the two presidents. The Bush campaign against Al Qaeda and its Taliban sponsor in Afghanistan was a decisive action that sent a real message to Islamic jihadists. While the war against Saddam Hussein was brillinatly executed at first, and then was mired in equivocation for several years before a suvvessful Surge, we now find that Biden is claiming credit for bush’s surge, conducted before Obama’s presidency, soimply because he can;t point to a single military action by obama that is praiseworthy.

The single largest criticism of Bush’s war against Iraq was that it did not locate an extensive Weapons of Mass Destruction capability. But that was because Bush believed the same propaganda that Clinton and the UN also believed, which had been put out by Saddam to intimidate his Iranian neighbors.

Furthermore, the mere fact that Bush invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq prompted Libya to reveal and then turn over to the US its entire, ongoing nuclear weapons development program, which no one in the US intelligence services had any inkling of. It also persuaded Pakistan to rein in the exploits of its own nuclear Johnny Appleseed. So in terms of sheer results, the invasion of Iraq netted the US the termination of 1 and 1/2 national nuclear programs, a pretty fair result when we were shooting for 1 nuclear program ended. One might say this was just dumb luck, but it was luck that came because Bush demonstrated an intolerance of anti-American weapons programs. Who knows what might have happened in Iran if we had surged in Iraq from the beginning and had taken a more threatening posture against Achmadinejad years ago, with US forces poised on both sides of his nation and on the Gulf? One can argue that if bush had come across as a little less reasonable, we might have been carting off the centrifuge parts from Iran as well as those form Libya.

Please post those recipes…we could make it a lil’ mass-market cookbook: The First Grader’s Guide to Autonomous Individual Brown-Bag Lunches.

I’m not particularly sure that running the government on the model of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s or any other massive corporation is a good idea. The efficiency of those corporations has much to do with the federal government’s power and regulations. The efficiency of Wal-Mart relies on the supra-state leveling power of the federal government. These corporations thrive on the artificial reduction of the regionalism and localism that you point to as a handicap for effective national government in the U.S.

As for Mr. Swenson’s comment, I hardly think that the eight years prior to President Obama displayed any more competence than the current president. The Republicans in Congress offer hardly more grounds to hope for competence, limits, or level-headedness than the Democrats. And as for former Governor Palin, her anti-intellectual populism combined with her inability to give an intelligent interview are just as discouraging as Obama’s elitist progressivism.

Now, in almost a year and a half of the Obama administration, I can’t think of anything coming out of the White House that makes me feel that I could not have done a better job of making decisions than President Obama. The farce of his months-long hemming and hawing about whether or not to do a “surge” in Afghanistan was a total display of stupidity. Obama could not explain why it was taking him so long to make up his mind, let alone explain why the decision he finally came up with was any better because of the months of dithering that went into it. And in the meantime, his inability to decide was encouraging America’s enemies.

In a number of movies in recent years we have had Morgan Freeman playing a distinguished American president who happens to be black. I am pretty sure that the real Morgan Freeman could do a better job in the White House than Barack Hussein Obama. (I think all that experience on The Electric Company grounded Mr. Freeman in common sense.)

When Obama criticized Sarah Palin during the campaign for “not being ready to be president”, the only thing he could point to in which he had even comparable experience to Palin’s was running his campaign for president! Obama has demonstrated that, if McCain had been elected and then died soon afterward, we could not have been in worse condition than we are now.

The only sadder aspect of the Obama fiasco is that there are no adults in the Democratic Party in Congress who can in any way make up for Obama’s incompetence.