Tallying the Cost

Wednesday 07 Jan 2009

As we see Churches across America in financial trouble; missions programs having to be cut back; and help for the needy all over the world being negatively affected by the global financial crisis; not to mention its impact on virtually every working class family in the world, it is timely once again to reflect on the foolishness that got us into this mess.

And, when we do this, we cannot ignore the intensive program of character assassination that has been waged against outgoing President George W. Bush for most of the past four years by his political opponents.  More than anything else, this campaign delivered us to where we are today; and we should not forget it.  This will not sit well with a lot of people, because they bought into the Bush bashing campaign.  However, it is truth that we cannot afford to ignore, if we ever want to recover the world economy and we make no apology for reminding the world of this truth.

America’s Key Role

As the facts have shown clearly in the past three months, love America or hate her, the global economy is totally reliant on America’s success; every retirement plan; every home mortgage; every bit of charitable giving; even the standard of living of every person in the world, in one way or another is influenced by the state of the American economy.  As a result, when you undermine confidence in the American presidency, you undermine confidence in the world economy and billions suffer, as they are suffering today.

You can say that President George W. Bush should have been strong enough to ignore such criticisms, and get on with the job.  And in this regard, George W. Bush did a pretty good job.  However, like the rest of us, he is only human; he only has so many hours in the day; and to successfully manage a country like America, the President of the United States of America needs every second of every hour, of every day to focus on the job.  Neither he, nor any other American president needs his own people undermining his efforts, which is what happened to George W. Bush in a large and concentrated way over the past four years.

Barack Stops Bashing

To President-elect Obama’s credit, he has stopped Bush bashing since winning the election.  He has been a model of cooperation with President Bush and the country and the world has benefited from the cooperation between the two sides.  Since winning the recent presidential election, Obama has made it clear that America has only one president and that he is not yet the President.  He has been active in commenting on world affairs, but has scrupulously avoided saying anything that would encourage America’s enemies at this difficult time.   If this would have been the norm for the past four years, then the world would be much different today.

But, some will say, if Obama and his supporters would have done this for the past four years, then Obama probably would not have won the election.  There is no guarantee of this, one way or the other.  As it turned out, Senator Obama was by far the most skilful of the president candidates in the last election and probably would have won without the Bush bashing.

Going Forward

Going forward, one good thing about the Republicans in America not having media support is that we will undoubtedly not see Obama bashing like we saw Bush bashing.  Mr. Obama and his friends are already trying to prepare for the next election by saying that they have inherited the worst financial crisis in history, but that won’t save President Obama in four years from now if he does not perform.

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