Why don’t you go back a little farther?
I had lots of nice things to say about Eisenhower, Cal Coolidge, and I also greatly admired the way FDR handled WW2.
I believe only site administrators have the key to the archive containing the original, corkboard “Straight Dope Message Board” and its tons of scrawled unlined notebook pages and cocktail napkin rants.
[sub]Otherwise, they’d have my classic anti Hitler thread “You know who else lobbied for lebensraum? Friedrich von Bernhardi, that’s who!” (It was an actual thread, embroidered onto a discarded gentleman’s ascot. Took me an hour to compose and three months to post.)[/sub]
What I don’t understand is how her keyboard can’t make an O!
I mean, at least make the effort and call him 0bama or one of the other silly re-spellings of his name the other, umm, folks use.
CMC fnord!
Well that’s fair then, although it still feels like Bush started many of the problems and Obama has had little chance to solve them what with the Republican ‘let’s say no to everything’ policy. I also wonder just how much power any president has to affect a global financial meltdown, perhaps it’s just going to take a few years for the overly optimistic people of the world to start spending money like it’s going out of fashion again.
Susanann, sorry if you’ve stated this already, but what policies would you like Obama to adopt, and I guess they’d need to be policies he could get passed, that would make him a better president in your opinion?
She’d like him to join a gun club and return to the gold standard.
Well, you’d have to go back to Jimmy Carter to find anyone as grossly incompetent as Obama is.
The last time the Senate passed a budget was April 29, 2009,
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/dems-breathtaking-refusal-pass-budget#ixzz1SGtQLFLK
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/dems-breathtaking-refusal-pass-budget
Is that really true? I don’t live in America and therefore probably miss a lot, but in what ways has Obama been incompetent?
The way I see it is that he has to fight a ton of Republicans and Tea Partiers over every single thing he does, their stated goal is to get him out asap regardless of what he does; Fox News views everything he does with a particularly vehement skew, and for some unknown reason this is the most popular news in the US; and he inherited a very bad situation both internal and external to the US, one in which whatever he does he will be painted as the bad guy.
The hated Obamacare promises to save money rather than lose it, and I’ve never heard any actual facts that prove it to have been a bad move, other than there may have been things that were even better that could have been done.
I’ve never heard from a credible source that the spending to boost the economy was disastrous, and it’s very hard to tell what the world would’ve looked like should there have been no spending, and as far as I can see most world leaders agreed with it, so it can;t be that crazy.
As far as I can tell he can hardly be blamed for the deficit, what spending has he done that wasn’t accepted as sensible by many people?
Where are all these big mistakes? What am I missing, and I admit it could be a lot as I only read up on what’s going on every now and then.
As I stated before, rather than people just stating he’s bad or incompetent is there anyone who can state what he’s done wrong, and what they would have done if they were in his shoes?
Originally Posted by Recovering Republican
Well, you’d have to go back to Jimmy Carter to find anyone as grossly incompetent as Obama is.
Yes. That is true. Neither one of those two knew anything about budgets, foreign policy, nor economics which is why both of them gave us economic depression while at the same time making the world less safe.
…except that obama is much more incompetent than even Carter. Obama is making a bigger mess than Carter did. This is not really very surprising, since obama’s greatest “achievement” (sic) in life was as a Chicago Community Organizer - which left that part of Chicago in shambles.
Okay, so if it’s Obama’s, and his predecessor’s fault the US is in an economic depression, why is that? I think the depression is basically due to an unregulated boom, and that what was required was more banking regulation and less joy in unrestricted growth. So I do think that many US presidents have been incompetent in that they listened to the bankers and economists and deregulated whatever they could.
I’m guessing you don’t agree with that assessment? So what should they have done economy wise? Are you one of the believers in an unregulated free market? Or do you have any other ideas?
Personally I think the people who say that doing x caused y in economics are not to be trusted, as economics has more in common with gambling and horoscopes than science.
Again, wrong. The fiscal 2011 budget was very late and spending was supported for a time under continuing resolutions, but a budget was eventually passed. Federal budgets are annual.
Why not go directly to the source?
Here’s the FY 2011 budget of the United States of America on the website of the government printing office.
I found it via a simple Google search for “US FY 2011 budget”. By the way, the same search has a wealth of other information and opinion about this year’s budget (which really did come in extremely late, as seems to be the case for the last several years).
You could at least check that a 5 second web search wouldn’t contradict your own chosen “facts”.
I don’t get the incompetence label. He got OBL by making the hunt for him a top priority. Bush didn’t have the guts to buck Pakistan and McCain said during the campaign that he would not have entered Pakistan to get OBL without their consent. He has killed a ton of Al Quada and Taliban leaders, upping the use of drones to hunt for them. We are drawing down troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Domestically he got rid of Don’t Ask Don’T Tell in a manner that it has become a complete non-issue. He saved GM and 10s of thousands of jobs that would have been lost. That investment will end up costing a fraction of what conservatives said it would.
He is the first President to accomplish universal health care putting us with the rest of the industrialized world that spends much, much less on healthcare than we do while having better results.
Of course there is more that he could have done: pass a bigger stimulus and get rid of GITMO detention, but those are policies the right has opposed vehemently.
I expect him to win the debt ceiling standoff and put us back on the path to fiscal sanity we had under the last Democratic president.
Hate him, disagree with him, but calling him incompetent just makes you look silly.
I just realized this is a 2 year window from 2009. So, to forestall any pointless objections:
US FY 2010 Budget
US FY 2009 Budget
US FY 2008 Budget
US FY 2007 Budget
And the corresponding Senate votes for the budget resolutions:
US FY 2010 Senate Budget Resolution Vote
US FY 2009 Senate Budget Resolution Vote
US FY 2008 Senate Budget Resolution Vote
US FY 2007 Senate Budget Resolution Vote
Maybe it takes more than a year to get it passed, but a new budget does get passed to deal with each fiscal year.
Which it is not supposed to, of course - the fiscal year starts in October and the budget is supposed to be passed by September - but there we are. It’s still an annual budget. Passing two year budgets would be a bad idea.
W was far, far more incompetent. Than Carter.
And he still got re-elected.
Settle in for a long ride.
I think the reason why Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize (before he had achieved anything…) was for the fact that he looks “all that different” from other Presidents.
BTW: The Norwegian Nobel committee decides who gets the Peace Prize, and at first I thought Obama’s nomination was a Norgehistoria.
Partly. But mainly because after 8 years of the Cheney-Bush Admin, the committee – and the world – wanted to congratulate America just for throwing out the Pubs.
Not like Bush who took a surplus into an enormous deficit. That is a man who knew his economics and showed incredible competence.
There is little reason to think another few hundred billion dollars to the seven hundred billion dollars in the stimulus bill would have made any difference.