What Will The Left Do, Without Bush?

President Bush is in the middle of his last term. He cannot run for President again. He is a "Lame Duck" president. At the beginning of his final term he announced some very grand plans for transforming the country. He set forth a grand agenda to establish tort reform, restructure the convoluted, oversized tax code and to reform Social Security. So far, only one of these items has been even moderately accomplished. By all accounts the president's actions towards reforming SS have been a dismal failure and he hasn't even started working on the tax code. I predict that this agenda will not be accomplished. The media is dead set against all of the items on this agenda. They control public opinion in this country and they still hold sway over the great majority of Americans.

Although all of these items were great ideas, even if they had been accomplished, I am not sure the end result would have been something better than the status quo. I mean, look at the other "victories" of this administration: No Child Left Behind, the new Transportation Bill, Medicare reform, etc. In each case, in an effort to wrangle votes from the opposition, a terrible result has been achieved. NCLB is a toothless measure that was made ridiculous, all the more so because it was co-written by Teddy Kennedy. The Transportation Bill is a pork-laden handout to every Senator and Congressperson, ruined by the desire for their re-election. Medicare is even worse off than it was before the reform, and that was a difficult achievement even for a politician.

The Left should be ecstatic about this presidency. There have been no real meaningful reforms to government, especially in juxtaposition with the hopeful agenda of the Contract With America ideals put forth by our new Republican congress in 1994, during the administration of Clinton, arguably the most corrupt and disingenuous political machine ever assembled.

Don't get me wrong. I think Bush is a genuine man. He says what he thinks and does try to do what he says. I believe the man when he speaks. I just don't know what, in the current political climate, is actually possible for a politician, even a President, to do.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. We need a return to our constitutional roots. We need to stop making political office a gem of a job that a person will kill to get and keep. We need to make it a duty to hold political office and a part-time duty at that. There is no reason why we should be paying-and paying well-politicians a full time salary with outrageous benefits to work at doing what they do to us on a full-time basis. All day, every day, politicians are working hard to mess up our lives. If the government were to be locked out for a couple of months, even if we had to pay these criminals during the lockout, we would all be immensely better off.

The Left has attacked the War On Terror, one of the only proactive and positive things the government has done for us in decades, as a "War For Oil", a war based on lies, a mistake and an affront to the rest of the world. They attack everything done by Bush and any of Bush's associates. Why do they do this? I think it is because they can't get over the loss of their two Golden Boys in the past two elections. You see, the American people want to move toward a more conservative place. They are tired of the moral relativism of the Left. They are tired of the socialist tendencies of our elected leaders and their kowtowing to corrupt and wrongheaded leaders from Europe and the rest of the world. They are tired of paying politicians to financially rape them while living the good life on their dime. They believed the Republican signators to the Contract With America and they are being grievously deceived by those same Republican Congresspeople. Still, they know they are better off with them than the alternative.

Because the Left can't MoveOn, they attack everything that this country does as if it were all Bush's fault. One great example is the idea that Bush has criminalized stem cell research. All Bush did was make it illegal to use Federal money to finance stem cell research beyond the existing stem cell lines. He didn't outlaw stem cell research. If this research is so promising, why does it need Federal money to achieve it's aims. Corporations should be clamoring over each other to throw R&D money at this sure fire deal. They aren't? Wonder why?

Right now, the Left is holding on to the little Bush-hating credibility it has left, getting supporters to help them in their fight against the evil Shrubya. They hold protests against the war as if they were back in the sixties at some love-in, and have the Hollywood loonies spouting the DU talking points for them on the evening news, while the MSM dutifully covers every rag-tag group of fifty idjits that hold up signs saying "NO War For Oil". But, I ask you good people, what will they do when Bush is gone? After his last term is completed, and he goes into retirement in Crawford, what will they do? Will they continue to camp out outside his ranch or will they MoveOn to some new enemy and attach the same ridiculous invectives to him or her?

Prediction: The Left will largely disappear after Bush is gone and the vacuum left by these people will be a ripe opportunity for the rest of us to enact some real change in this government. I'd opt for something simple for starters. How about the Contract With America? It sounded good to me at the time.