No, it is just more prominent with them.
As to Bush III, were you expecting different? I wasn't. Sadly, he is better than McCain would have been, who promised to take Bush and multiply him by several times. And there is every reason to believe that he would have. And Romney, well...
Obama is a pragmatic kind of guy. His early fault was believing that he could craft things that the Republicans would buy into because they supported those things in the past. He was wrong. Because it never was about the ideas or policies it was all about politics.
By playing it safe on national security issues, he wound up having to adopt all of the crappy stuff that Bush had put into place. For example, the NSA. If he had scaled them back, even those things that weren't yielding results, and there was a successful terrorist attack, the Republicans would have shut the country down while they investigated it. Safer to keep things in place or even expand them in small ways. Same with ME policy. It gave him at least some cover. But there is a cost.
The problem is that in 2008 the choice on the Democratic side was basically Obama and Hillary. Hillary wasn't viable because the Republicans had decades to build up an opposition to her. The campaign would have been a circus. Ironically, the Republicans made her a viable candidate by building up Bill's administration to hammer Obama with. A lot of that rubbed off on her. And that neutralized a lot of what they could throw at her. The campaign is still going to be a circus if she gets the nomination, though.
As far as McCain, he all but promised war with Iran. If you think Iraq was a joyride, well Iran would have been much, much worse. The terrain is a military nightmare. And if we take out Iran, we would have to take out Syria. And Lebanon. And probably institute a draft so we could pacify those countries. If you think the ME is unstable now, that would be many times worse.
And then there is Russia. That we can blame on Bill Clinton. We, along with Western Europe, went out of our way to humiliate Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.It was inevitable that sooner or later someone like Putin would come to power. When we invaded Iraq and the price of oil went through the roof, Russia was able to start getting the money Putin needed to put his dreams of recreating the Russian Empire into motion. Unless the EU discouraged it, it was inevitable that the old Eastern Bloc would drift towards the EU and away from Russia. I mean, being in the Russian sphere of influence meant being poor. Being in the EU sphere meant not being as poor with a shot at being prosperous. So competition is/was inevitable. |
