Well, history was made yesterday. The first African-American was inaugurated as President of the United States of America. Let me say here that I loath the politically correct term “African American” to describe people who have distinguishable Negro blood and are citizens of the United States of America. Not all people who live on the African continent or are descended from ancestors who lived there are of Negro blood. I know people who are extremely Caucasian in appearance, who hale from South Africa and whose antecedents there go back for many generations. For the most part, my ancestors were Europeans—our genealogy claims lines through most of the royal courts—with a smattering of indigenous American blood through the Sac and Fox tribes. Note that I did not use the silly and inaccurate term “Native American”. Anyone born in America is a Native American; black, white, red, brown or yellow—Sorry, Rev, no rhymes here. But I digress…
Yesterday, Barak Hussein Obama was sworn in as President of the United States. I did not vote for President Obama. I would have liked to vote for the first “black” man to hold the office of President, but I disliked Obama’s policies, for being too liberal, and I was extremely suspicious of his numerous past associations with radicals. It was, however, cool to see a major milestone passed in American race relations. I doubt that it will mean much to some people, both black and white, because they have so much invested in their race-based hatred and mistrust. I honestly did not care for the Republican party’s nominee this time around either. He, like Obama, had bought into the man-made-climate change hysteria and was unwilling to embrace a logical energy policy, was not very reassuring on tax cutting, and joined in enthusiastically on the government financial bail-outs for Wall Street and the banking and automotive industries. Only my fear of a weakened American war on terror under an Obama and the assured reign (or perhaps rain) of more liberal federal judges made me enthusiastically vote for McCain. But, Obama won. He is my President, and I wish him well. He won the election and he deserves a chance to fail and, perhaps, learn from mistakes. I suspect that the liberal media, the Hollywood loonies, and the angry left cut him a lot of slack for a very long time, because he is their man and they really want him to succeed. I too want success for our country and I will support him when he makes the right choices, however, I will surely moan and complain and say “I told you so” when and if he does fail.
I liked President Bush very much for his desire and willingness to take on our country's enemies and do the hard lifting and take hateful and ignorant criticism leveled at him by the liberal media, Hollywood nuts and the liberal fascists without complaint. I also praise him for two pretty conservative Supreme Court nominations. I moaned and complained, of course, when he let spending get out of hand; tried too hard to appease the likes of Kennedy, Reed, Shumer, and Pelosi; and decided that Wall Street and the loan institutions needed to be bailed out with tax-payer money, but I believe he was a good and honorable man who did his best in very trying times, just not a Ronald Reagan conservative.History tells me to have great doubts.
Much like today, FDR replaced an economically liberal Republican President Herbert Hoover and continued some of his more liberal initiatives and randomly tried to come up with even more liberal solutions to the country’s economic ills. His efforts actually stalled a recovery from the world-wide Great Depression in the United States, making it worse, while Europe, with a more hands-off conservative approach, was digging itself back to prosperity. If not for World War II and the need for American labor products abroad during the war, we would have suffered even longer. For an education on this subject you might like to read the following books: “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes; “1920: The Year of the Six Presidents” by David Pietrusza; and “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” by Jonah Goldberg. The fact is the scenario we find ourselves in is scarily similar. As FDR did, I can easily visualize Obama trying to fix the economy by one wrong-headed liberal program after another.
Ronald Reagan’s approach to fixing economic woes was to get government out of the way. The problem we have at the moment is that government was too much involved. They had oversight of banking and loan institutions, but they neglected, or chose not, to do their duties in that regard. As I stated in an earlier blog, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started the ball rolling for our current housing and banking woes, while congress, especially the democrats had their hands all over it. Reagan would have let the institutions fail or go into bankruptcy. Like the airline industry did, the auto industry would have come back leaner and stronger, and our banks and lending institutions would have eventually come back, though some would have failed. The economy would have righted itself in a shorter time than it likely will with all of our government’s assistance. The pain would have been acute but relatively short. Under big government intervention, the pain will likely be long-term and chronic. I wish President Obama well, but I expect that I need to get use to disappointment.
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