I've heard this a lot lately and I don't get it. I don't hear Obama blaming Bush too much. It is clear that Bush was against regulation of any industry. The Bush administration was also a gift to all forms of mining. And while we don't know what Cheney said in his secret meetings with oil executives we do know that oil companies did very well in the last decade. It's clear that MMS was crappy under Bush so I think Obama's comments on Tuesday were fair:
"One place we’ve already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations. When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency. But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow."
But if people (ok, Republicans) are saying Obama is wrong to blame Bush at all for things that happened under his term, what were they saying when Bush was blaming Clinton? As I recall Bush was always blaming Clinton or liberals or anyone for his mistakes. I've seen a bunch of comments online that seem to forget this, so I've collected some:
In July 2004, just before the 9/11 Commission Report came out, the G.O.P. Blames Clinton For Intelligence Failures. "After their briefing, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and other House Republican leaders held a news conference at which they suggested that the report, which is scheduled to be made public on Thursday, would show that intelligence and law enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks were more the responsibility of the Clinton administration than of the Bush administration." Of course that's not really what the report concluded.
As I recall a common theme was that Republicans blamed Clinton for not immediately retaliating on al Qaeda for the Oct 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole. But the facts are we didn't have evidence that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack until Bush was in office and Bush choose to do nothing.
Here's a NY Times article from Sept 2004 (during the reelection campaign), Cheney's Praise of Bush Takes a Dig at Clinton (and Reagan). "He blamed the Clinton and Reagan administrations for teaching terrorists that 'they could strike us with relative impunity' and that 'if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy.'" Also, "On the economy, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Clinton left office with the country on the road to a recession. Then, he said, the Sept. 11 attacks dealt another serious blow to the economy, but he cited recent gains as signs that the president's policies, including tax cuts, were working." Yup they were working great.
A year later in Aug 2005, in speech Bush gave commemorating the 60th anniversary of World War II victory in the Pacific, he brought this up again. "They looked at our response after the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. They concluded that free societies lack the courage and character to defend themselves against a determined enemy." A week later, Bush asked Clinton to help raise money for Katrina relief.
In October 2006 North Korea tested a nuclear bomb. Here's a Washington Post article (Oct 12, 2006) Bush Faults Clinton Policy, But the Debate is Complex with Bush (well Condolessa Rice) blaming Clinton for it.
Here's a CNN article From July 28, 2008 White House projects record deficit for 2009. This chart of theirs shows the history of budget surpluses and deficits. Remember Bush was the first president to cut taxes during a war, "But a senior administration official says the budgetary problems stem from what he called inadequate defense, intelligence and homeland security resources that were handed down from Clinton." And Bush never included the cost of the war in his budgets and kept it as emergency funding or some such thing.
In Feb 2009 Michael Steele was also blaming Clinton for the economy. And this wasn't new. In August 2002, Bush says he inherited recession.
And of course it wasn't just the administration blaming Clinton, Fox News did it constantly.
I don't have the patience for the hypocrisy. And I don't have the need to watch news programs that let one side or the other come on spew it without being challenged. Why is it that only The Daily Show seems to put some of these things in context. Last night, Stewart had a great segment on how "The last eight presidents have gone on television and promised to move America towards an energy-independent future."
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