It appears that Bush has been dealt a coup d’etat, with the Dems winning not one but both houses (Senate 51-49, House 229-196), not to mention a majority of Govenors and the (effectively forced) resignation of Rumsfeld. Ouch!
Awwww, poor Bushy.
It will be interesting to see what the Dems do with their newfound power. Hopefully opening up lots of investigations into things that were previously suppressed: political corruption (a la Abramoff), corruption in handing out government contracts (a la KBR/Halliburton), voter manipulation (see previous post), mishandling of the Iraq war etc. etc. etc.
Yeah Bush Jr will go down in history very badly I think.
The real disappointment is that even with the Presidency, the judiciary and both houses of Congress for almost six years – the Republicans could not substantially reduce the size of government in the US.
The irony is that the federal government significantly expanded in the US during this period with draconian social experiments (aka the Schiavo farce), social policies (aka the “No Child Left Behind” balone straight out of France), minimal reform of the huge US tax code and enough pork barrelling to fund a medium sized African nation.
The really interesting challenge now is to see what the Dems will do in Congress.
Yeah that’s certainly been an interesting trend with Bush and the current Republications – their complete departure from one of the most core conservative principles – small government. I found it absolutely bizzare that the Bush administration, otherwise extremely conservative, turned into such a huge spending and interventionist government, with no sense of fiscal responsibility or non-interventionism. Instead the GOP has effectively changed the defintion of ‘conservative’ to mean ‘socially conservative but otherwise downright socialist’. It seems they have been trying to make up for their lack of fiscal and small government conservatism by instead turning attention to gays, terrorists, abortion rights, and stem cell research. Not much of a direction for a country.