As his time runs out, George Bush rushes through controversial legislation
Dear George Bush,
Finally, it has hit you - for the first time in eight years, you will be a ‘nobody’. In a matter of weeks, you will be leaving the White House to be replaced by someone of a wholly different political mindset. You could, of course, deal with this news in a mature, dignified and respectable manner and accept that your time has come to an end. Instead, you have decided that your last days are going to be taken up by shoving through highly controversial legislation that you’ve been dying to burden the electorate with now that you don’t have to care what the voters think of you.
As President of the United States, you are always entitled to put forward legislation for Congress and the Senate to look through. However, it seems that rather than trying to win over those evil Democrat-dominated institutions, you will use your executive powers to force through several pieces of legislation on policy issues that have proved a nuisance over the past eight years. In the last few days, you have put forward two alarming measures that have caused uproar in the US media. Firstly, you are planning to grant new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures such as sterilisations on religious or moral grounds. Until now, these providers have not been able to withhold treatments but thanks to your own beliefs you will deny all sorts of treatments to individuals in need just whenever a doctor doesn’t want to carry out an operation because their ‘morals’ don’t allow them to. What a joke. Earlier this month, you also set in motion an order to lift restrictions on oil drilling on fragile federal lands in Utah. Environmental groups decried your decision – you were unmoved. The rule changes include taking wolves off the Endangered Species List (Sarah Palin will be delighted), allowing power plants to operate near national parks, relaxing regulations for factory farm waste and making it easier for mountain-top coal mining operations. The opposition to these plans is both fierce and justified. Everyone knows that you hate the very notion of protecting the environment yet even by your standards this is pretty bloody crass.
When Barack Obama takes office, he will be looking at several other areas of policy that you have implemented purely on personal religious motives. In 2001, you restricted federal funding of stem cell research to almost zero due to your religious beliefs. Research into this crucial scientific field was crippled but, because conservatives like you object to the destruction of embryos because they believe it ends a human life, you intervened and ultimately got your way. Obama has already stated on the record that he supports the creation of new stem cells from embryos and I suspect that he will overturn your idiocy. You also used your powers in office to restrict government funding to family planning organisations that promote smaller families or abortion in some circumstances, although Mr Obama might not be too concerned about this when the economy is still in tatters. Guantanamo Bay may prove more tricky for the incoming president to handle, seeing as the political sensitivity of the issue is palpable and the War On Terror shows no sign of abating once you leave office, given the enormous commitments already made by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The curious thing about all this is that I thought you would be looking to see out your last few weeks in office in a relatively positive, peaceful manner. This would have involved pretending to do something constructive to help the economic crisis, maybe looking busy in the Middle East and more generally looking to prevent yourself from becoming the most unpopular President in living memory. None of the above news items that I have presented in this letter are unexpected given your past record, but I thought there was a genuine chance that you might seek to limit your unpopularity in the dying days of your reign as President and give yourself something of a respectable legacy. I was wrong.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
It’s traditional. This is the list of pardons handed out by Clinton the day before he stepped down as pres but you won’t hear much about this from the BBC or the rest of the MSM.
How come my preceding comment was rated at 2.5 stars within a nanosecond of posting the comment?
Obama will undoubtedly address and reverse unacceptable effects of the Bush administration.
Paulson tried and failed in his ‘time of crisis’.
Their treatment of abortion providers counterproductive. If someone like Baby P’s mother had said she couldn’t cope & wanted an abortion, would she have been forced to give birth against her will? You can talk glibly about adoption, but I can’t imagine myself living with the knowledge that a child of mine was living with another family.
Surely it is a greater evil to deny contraception to people in the Third World, ensuring that children will be born into misery & more & more pressure will be put on natural resources?
The environmental stuff, again, is just horrifying. They don’t seem to realise that our well-being depends on living in a healthy environment. It is not conservative to wantonly despoil the planet, or have I missed something? The same goes for the Clarksonite ideal of endless cars, roads & out of town shopping complexes, which even Cameron rejects.
I sometimes think they just do things because they they will wind left-liberals up & give them a laugh, when even they don’t imagine it doing any actual good.
Umbongo, the rating for every comment starts at 2.5 and goes up or down from there depending on what your fellow commentors think! I’m sure Clinton tried something similar but that doesn’t exactly exhonerate Bush….
Jean, I expect Obama to get straight to work on Bush’s actions. No doubt he is watching what is happening very carefully. Paulson is also watching his reputation suffer at the moment.
Asquith, I’m not sure this is purely an anti-liberal agenda. I’ve always got the feeling that Bush has been holding back on precisely these sorts of policies to prop up his faltering poll ratings for many years, but now he knows that his time is running out and has clearly made a conscious decision to enforce his own personal religious beliefs on America.
And, speaking as a staunch critic of bush sine his election via the one-man-one-vote system where the one man had to be a Supreme Court Justice, cogniscent of his early spy-plane-in-China debacle (April 2001 – http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/04/01/us.china.plane/), he’s not thus far managed to get us all killed and that has pleased, and surprised, me greatly!
This just goes to show how he values democracy, not. I would like to say unbelievable! But it is not, in fact it is almost expected.
LFAT
Thanks for the explanation re rating
I’m not exonerating Bush. All I’m saying is that they all do it so Bush should get no harder ride (or easier one for that matter) than anyone else. However you can bet your boots – or Conservative Party Membership Card – that the commentariat will give Bush a going over for inappropriate pardons while throwing reports of similar behaviour by past (Democratic) presidents down the memory hole.
BTW – this list:
George W Bush – 113 (to date)
Bill Clinton – 396
George HW Bush – 74
Ronald Reagan – 393
Jimmy Carter – 534
Gerald Ford – 382
Richard Nixon – 863
Lyndon Johnson – 960
John F Kennedy – 472
from this 2007 article here might be instructive.
We know Nixon was a crook (well they probably all are, but Nixon was caught) but, setting his “magnanimity” aside, it appears that recent Democratic presidents were freer with their executive pardons than Republicans. Even so, despite my low expectations of the commentariat this time round, in 2001 the Guardian gave Clinton a bashing and refused to give Carter a free pass even though he issued a blanket pardon for Vietnam protestors/deserters etc.