Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Loved President Obama’s 2nd Inauguration speech given today. I heard the social contract in his words. In a post on my iHumanism blog I highlighted some of my favorite parts of the speech.
I‘ll be honest. Before the 2008 elections I didn’t pay much attention to who Barack Obama was. I knew the name, I knew he was black, and knew he was some up and coming politician from Illinois but that was about it. After hearing his personal story and his ideas for this country, I am so glad he is taking the oath of office today. He is a mix of different races and cultures but also the child of a single mother. He is a prime example of what America is all about.
Although I always knew there was a possibility we could elect a black man as President, I just never thought it would be now. I didn’t think we were ready. Sometimes current events come together and create that single tipping point which causes a major shift in this country. 2008 and was that tipping point and Barack Obama was the catalyst.
He knew he couldn’t win because he thought he deserved to. He had to sell himself to the electorate. He knew he couldn’t seem too left or right so he preached bi-partisanship. He knew he didn’t have an established machine most major political players do so he used his organizing skills to build one from scratch.
He knew he had some things going against him. He was black. He had a Muslim sounding name in a post 9/11 world. He was the son of a single mother with his father dying when he was a young man.
Then we had an administration that for 8 years screwed things up from foreign policy to the economy. People were ready for a change.
Through all of that Obama worked for more than two years to eventually to win the office of President of the United States of America.
Today is his day. The day he officially takes office. It is also OUR day. The US is one of the few, if the only, country who has a change of government without guns and blood in the streets. Over 200 years of mundane hand over of the office to the next person.
40 years after the lowest point in the struggle for black civil rights we have our first black President. To me it was never about his race. It was never about his resume. It was about his ideas and his personal story.
I am also a child of a single mother. My father was killed in Vietnam when I was barely a month old, so I had no father in my life. Some kids called me a bastard and some conservatives kept saying my family experience was evil and that I would turn out to be some drug addicted criminal because I didn’t have a dad in my life. It was tough to take sometimes.
With Obama taking the oath today, it will vindicate me and be at least be a major step for all those children of single parents who are normal, well adjusted, and successful in life despite our fractured family history.
I know he doesn’t have a magic wand that will solve all our current challenges but it is great that we once again have someone who is smart, thoughtful, and someone who knows about the world outside our borders in the top job. It will be a refreshing change.
TV host Craig Ferguson opens his show each night saying “This is a great day for America!” and I echo that for this day – Inauguration Day
Good luck to us and our new President Barack Hussein Obama II.
Today is your last full day. Make sure you clean out your desk and turn in your parking pass. As one of my supervisors once told me “Your services are no longer required…” Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out – and take Darth Cheney with you.
The US Supreme Court installed you in office. You won re-election because of efforts to ban Gay marriage. You started 2 wars and had no exit strategy. You allowed our rights to be trampled on because you felt like it. You and your “free market” money whores fucked the economy and ruined our nation’s rep in the rest of the world.
You refuse to acknowledge you did anything wrong and hope that history judges you better than current events.
I will give you one small tiny credit – you did get the spineless Congress to bend to your will with a lower popularity level than Nixon had during Watergate. That was impressive.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s “pursuit of disastrous policies.” In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
BUH-BYE… BUH-BYE… I’m sorry. BUH-BYE…