The fact that someone on the Left blindly hated Bush is your cover that THE Left was overwhelmingly blinded by hatred. Anyone that said “but look . . . he’s an embarassment to your club and a crappy President” was shouted down with “partisan zealot!”

There are certainly easy pickings when it comes to finding Righties that “blindly hate” Obama . . . can I mock and discount all Right criticism of the man as a result? Your rules.

What about those on the Left (and the Center) that blindly hated him because he was an incompetent fu@kwad who nevertheless managed to get seemingly otherwise intelligent people to blindingly defend him . . . not on the basis of his talent and ability, but apparently for no other reason than he was a club member and the other club was the source of the critique?

You don’t want an “I told you so”? Fine. But unless every person that spoke out against him was a rabid party mouthpiece you owe quite a few people an apology for sneering and mocking what you now admit were valid criticisms.

“But an honest appraisal of my former support for the man must include the fact that I was fooling myself more than anything. The writing was on the wall all along regarding the man’s faux conservatism - not to mention his many screw ups including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prosecutors fiasco, justification for torture, and his curious habit of promoting and appointing incompetents for important jobs in government who also happened to be big campaign contributors or other cronies.”

So the writing was on the wall . . . but anybody that saw it was not worth considering.

Let me ask you this . . . WHY did you decieve yourself? Was it because shucks darn you really liked him? Was it because he was a Red? Was it because “Teh Left” was saying what “the writing on the wall” said and that was something you just couldn’t accept? Was it for some other reason?

“An editor of the Harvard Law Review compared to a guy who couldn’t get into law school in Texas.”

Bush released his transcripts. Obama’s remain sealed. My guess is because like Bush he was a second-rate, “C” student of limited capacity. As for editing the Harvard Law Review, it is one of the few that allows that post to be filled by a popular election rather than academic merit. I’m sorry, but my point stands. An incompetent has been followed by an unqualified incompetent. Spin all you want, but as I wrote above this country is in deep shit.

As for the economics of Bush vs. Obama, the former has the edge since the latter basically is illiterate on the matter. To be fair, Obama was elected to end the war rather than fix the economy. The fact he has done neither and made both worse makes me debate whether he will edge out Bush, or the reverse, in rankings of pathetic, failed presidents.

From a partisan standpoint, I should fall on my knees and thank whatever powers there are that such an unqualified and ineffectual president of the other party followed Bush. As an American, I simply see a continuation of incompetence and cronyism on steroids.

perhaps we should go back to first principles.?

What does this mean?

…

“Note: Please do not crow in the comments “I told you so.” What - you expect me to listen to partisan lefties at the time? ”

I think the point is that *you* told yourself so, i.e. what you needed to know, in 1999, but you didn’t listen to you (pardon the ugly phrasing …)

Many of the dynamics in play here are familiar to people who have worked on large boondoggle projects in construction, software, or people who have successfully anticipated market bubbles etc. (http://www.amazon.com/Death-March-2nd-Edward-Yourdon/dp/013143635X, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kahneman07/kahneman07_index.html, http://www.irrationalexuberance.com/) People see the schedule slipping and somehow rationalise it. Anybody who expresses concerns based on the actual data is nonetheless branded an apostate, lazy, incompetent etc. Groupthink abounds.

The difficult question is how to conduct oneself knowing that all this is true. Say you were a traditional conservative foreign policy realist/minimalist circa 2002 who didn’t believe in nation building. What could you have done? Oppose the war and become a pariah? Vote for Kerry in 2004? Start a third party?

Bush has just tarnished his legacy. I will always honor him for his work in the war on terror. He redefined the Republican Party? He’s taking credit for the mess we’re in now? He put the conservatives in such a fix and is taking credit for it?

A friend of mine took a picture with Clinton in 1999 and is proud of it. Personally I will be sending W my badges from 2000 and 2004 and would not ask him for an autograph (much less a photo) if I had the chance.

Congratulations, President Bush, you have now earned the sobiquet “turd blossom”.

I’m thinking here of the career of Yassar Arafat. Back in the 1970’s, Sadat invited Israel and the Palestinians to a peace conference, which eventually led to the signing of the Camp David accords. Egypt got the Sinai Peninsula, Israel got a peace treaty with its most powerful neighbor, and the Palestinians got practically nothing. The reason Arafat was such an ineffective negotiator is rather obvious–he never showed up at the negotiations. But that self-imposed failure didn’t hurt him politically the way that making a more serious attempt and still failing would have; he remained in power until his death. So that is one example of gaining a permanent majority based on the prescription: don’t try to do a good job at running the country; just get good at managing your failures.

Just because that strategy worked for Arafat doesn’t mean it would work in the United States. But before Bush and Rove, had anyone really tried?

You have every right not to accept getting laughed at on your own blog.

Elsewhere…