Garrison Keillor has an article here on OEN praising America for electing Barack Obama President of the United States. In the article, he implies that electing Obama has instantly removed the US from pariah status in the world of nations. Well, Garrison, it’s not quite that easy.
Barack Obama meets the minimum standards of education, respect for learning and appreciation for competence that we must expect from any president of the United States. To those of us who value those qualifications as quite ordinary in a person elevated to the highest executive position in the land, Obama is merely an ordinary man, left to wander among the ruins and rubble left by eight years of the Bush worshipers of ignorance and incompetence.
That does not make America cool. Allowing George Bush to rampage throughout the country and the world for eight years, raping and pillaging, does not make America cool.
Keillor ignores or forgets that as of this writing, George Bush is still President of the United States. America would be cool if it were not possible for it to place a man such as George Bush in it’s presidency. Finally doing the right thing by doing the ordinary thing cannot undo and does not absolve from having done the wrong thing, the effects of which are ongoing with no end in sight.
America, at least those of you who voted for George Bush, has a lot of penance to do for what you have done to yourself, our country and the rest of the world.
Those of you who voted for Bush cannot make up for the damage you have done with that vote by voting for Obama. I have yet to hear a single “Sorry” for that from you. You will have to live with the damage brought about by your Bush regime for years to come.
The Bush regime is yours. You voted him into office. You are responsible for what you and he have done.
Obama is an intelligent, thoughtful, insightful and very smart man. After all, he was smart enough to get himself elected president against all odds against him. But, even with all that he is still just an ordinary man, with the minimum qualifications we must expect of our president.
In contrast to George Bush and his ideology driven Republicans, ordinary looks real good. That brings up the question, Is ordinary enough to undo the damage America has done to itself by electing Bush and his Republicans, and the ideology of cronyism, corruption, ignorance and incompetence that George Bush has used as his primary operating principles?
We’ve had eight years of the worst presidential administration in all of our history. Eight years that destroyed our Constitutional system, our political system, our economic system and our place in the world, and an innocent million or so people in Iraq.
And that, Mr. Keillor, is decidedly uncool.
