Kahuna, I overall like your style - but I have to disagree on a few things -

1. The war - you will find I am not going to back down on speaking my mind. Although I am not going to stand up for how he "conducted" the war, I will not stand by and let people just act like he went in alone. The Dems and everyone else voted for the war, and now want to go back and whine that it is all Bushes fault. The reality is that he did not lie, and nobody whined until it got a little hard. It is not like he was over there collecting intelligence - he and all the members of congress believed the intelligence. The reality is, the thing that should really scare us the most is "WHERE IS ALL THAT STUFF NOW???". We know it existed, so where did it go? He gassed the kurds with it, killing thousands, and where is it now? I pray it does not end up in an American city someday.

Of course, this will not matter until the next attack - do me a favor - print out this post and tack it to a bullitin board somewhere so when the next attack occurs, you can check it out.

2. I think you are Bashing when you say that Carter was more respectable, yada yada yada. I think Jimmy Carter was a wonderful person and a lousy president. Letting the hostages in Iran for 444 days is inexcusable, and worse than what we did in Iraq, sorry. I would rather be disliked by some than be the laughingstock of the world for 444 days. Jimmy Carter was a good person no doubt, I don't think GWB has done anything to make us think any different of him. All the junk about lying about WMD and all that is a bunch of malarchy(keeping it clean here :#1

Clinton on the other hand - scumbag extraordinaire - interns in the office? The guy ranks with the dude dating the pages in the senate.

3. The economy - I have to tell you, I am actually IN the economy every day (ok, I envy all you retired guys, big time). The media is overhyping just about everything. Our biggest concerns should be INFLATION and not a recession. Yes, we may end up with a mild recession on paper - but the job market is still incredibly strong (it surprises me, that is for sure, lots of jobs, no qualified people to fill them). Everything is going up in price - everything from China is up 30%, Steel is up 40%, Aluminum is up 25%, paper is up, plastics are up - and this is all in the last year. Demand is decent, and for many items it is actually strong (you can't sustain price increases without demand). A lot of this is the weak dollar, and that had to happen due to the trade deficit(which Bush did not create by the way, Americans did). Imports are fading and Exports are climbing - John Deere, Caterpillar, Bucyrus, P&H, Manitowoc Crane, Harley Davidson are all running at capacity to satisfy the export markets - the only issues are that many companies need to build a foreign sales force to take care of their new competitiveness. If the dollars stays low(It almost has too), this will correct itself and exports will continue to climb.

Although Credit is tight due to the subprime mess, it seems to be loosening up lately and I am sure will be back to normal in 6 months to a year.

My message is not to overreact about the economy. The media will be screaming how bad it is in an attempt to get Obama elected, just like they did in 2004 - when we were in the middle of a boom! Some people will believe it and most of us will continue to go to work everyday, and in a year we will look up and the stock market will be up 15% from current levels, GDP will be at 3% and unemployement around 5% - my only concern is that price levels will be up 5-10% at the same time - and that should be the concern of all of you who are living on a fixed income, NOT a recession.


Bottom line for me is that Bush will go down as another in a line of Mediocre presidents, not great, not bad, about the same as Clinton.

We won't really know for about 20 or more years until we have a little more objectivity, and see the results longer term of Iraq, etc.

Carter was long enough ago to really Judge - I can't for the life of me think of one thing good that came out of his presidency, except the election of Ronald Reagan.

Ed