Bush Condemns Congress for Lack of Productivity
It’s easy to see why President Bush thinks this Congress has been slow to act. President Bush has befriended Libya’s dictator; supported a disastrous Israeli war with Hezbollah; helped prop up a dictator in Pakistan who overthrew democracy, undermines the rule of law, has helped foster nuclear weapons, and has given safe haven to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden; kept a blind eye to Iran’s support for terrorism and their development of nuclear weapons; begun payoffs to North Korea after years of condemning the practice; withdrew troops from Afghanistan before the job was done; invaded Iraq and spectacularly botched the occupation; pushed a drug benefit which disproportionately benefits drug and insurance companies; and plunged the country from extraordinary economic growth and budget surpluses into enormous deficits and stagnant wage growth.
These are not the failures of a standard President. Normally, it would take decades or generations to accumulate this amount of governmental failure, but despite taking an awful lot of time for vacations, this President has made the mistakes of ten Presidents. So it’s easy to see how he might think this Congress has been unproductive: The main things Congress has accomplished are an increase in the minimum wage, passage of an ethics and lobbying reform bill, and taking baby steps towards a withdrawal from the Iraqi civil war. Those accomplishments must seem few and tiny when compared against the huge stack of failures the President has reeled off so effortlessly year after year.
These are not the failures of a standard President. Normally, it would take decades or generations to accumulate this amount of governmental failure, but despite taking an awful lot of time for vacations, this President has made the mistakes of ten Presidents. So it’s easy to see how he might think this Congress has been unproductive: The main things Congress has accomplished are an increase in the minimum wage, passage of an ethics and lobbying reform bill, and taking baby steps towards a withdrawal from the Iraqi civil war. Those accomplishments must seem few and tiny when compared against the huge stack of failures the President has reeled off so effortlessly year after year.
