Some Final Thoughts on Election 2008

America spoke. Obama was elected as President of the United States. I personally think it was a poor choice and I hope and pray that with the election out of the way Obama will abandon his far left rhetoric and shift to a more centrist stance during his time as President.

I wish Mike Huckabee had run against Obama. Huckabee had the personality and public speaking skills to counter Obama blow for blow. Huckabee also had some truly good ideas for America.

John McCain was extremely graceful in defeat and I wish his concession speech would get played as often as Obama’s victory speech.

The Democrats, while they gained in the House and Senate, did not get a super majority. That would have been a disaster. I hope that after dramatic losses in two straight elections that Republicans will realize that the abandonment of conservative principles (especially fiscal ones) is what has been their downfall. Hopefully, this election will force Republicans to return to small government, fiscal, and social conservatism.

Obama is now Commander in Chief and I hope, since he has no military experience, that he surrounds himself with unbiased advisors who understand the military.

Finally, George W. Bush can breathe a sigh of relief. I am one of a seemingly small number of Americans who think Bush has been a good president overall. I vehenmently disagree with the amount of spending and government expansion that he approved with his pen, but he played a huge role in helping to keep America from being attacked by terrorists again. We seem to have lost sight of that, but I remember and I am grateful. I hope that as the years pass and people have time to reflect on his Presidency that people will remember his leadership during the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

President Bush has caught a lot of flack and taken a lot of blame for things that were not directly his fault. This opinion piece from The Wall Street journal offers a good perspective on the Bush presidency and why our treatment of him has been a disgrace and why he ultimately deserves our respect.

Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ piece Jeffrey Scott Shapiro:

Earlier this year, 12,000 people in San Francisco signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. The proposition is only one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Leave a comment