IF YOU'RE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT... VOTE REPUBLICAN!

Let's see now: endless war in Iraq, over 4,000 dead, a trillion dollars wasted- yup, Mission Accomplished! Not to mention running the national debt up $3.7 trillion in seven short years, letting our infrastructure be decimated, our military stop-lossed and in shambles as recruiters scrape the gutters for new recruits, every governmental agency put in charge of incompetent political hacks, gasoline at $4.00 a gallon, oil at $137 a barrel...

On June 3, 2008, in a Louisiana speech, Arizona Senator and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain said:

“You will hear from my opponent's campaign in every speech, every interview, every press release that I'm running for President Bush's third term. You will hear every policy of the President described as the Bush-McCain policy. Why does Senator Obama believe it's so important to repeat that idea over and over again? Because he knows it's very difficult to get Americans to believe something they know is false. So he tries to drum it into your minds by constantly repeating it rather than debate honestly the very different directions he and I would take the country.”

On June 15, 2005, Senator McCain appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, and gave this response to host Tim Russert:

“MR. RUSSERT: And what people point to -- and this is an article in your hometown paper, the Arizona Republic, "At Odds With Bush. John McCain repeatedly has taken maverick positions that have put him at odds with President Bush's administration" . . . . The fact is you are different than George Bush.

SEN. McCAIN: No. No. I -- the fact is that I'm different but the fact is that I have agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush. So have we had some disagreements on some issues, the bulk -- particularly domestic issues? Yes. But I will argue my conservative record voting with anyone's, and I will also submit that my support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people.”

There is a clear choice in the 2008 Presidential election. If you are happy with the way things are right now, if your vision for our future includes an endless war in Iraq, draining America’s blood, its treasury, fracturing its military, and destroying its world wide standing, then vote Republican. If you like the energy policies pursued by the Bush Administration the last 8 years and you like gas at $4.00+ per gallon, well, here’s the telling quote from a 2001 White House press conference:

“Q Is one of the problems with this, and the entire energy field, American lifestyles? Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

MR. FLEISCHER: That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country....”

If you are more concerned with two gays getting married in California than with the loss of your privacy from government wiretaps, then vote Republican. If you care more about what Michelle Obama, Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s barber, mailman, or paper boy have to say than the fact that your job has just been outsourced to Singapore and your insurance company won’t cover your wife because she had cancer 5 years ago, then vote Republican. If you want countries like China and Saudi Arabia to hold the mortgage on America, able to pull the plug on our economy at a moment’s whim, then vote Republican. If you like the additional 3.7 trillion (that’s $3,700,000,000,000) in debt run up during President Bush’s stewardship of the nation’s treasury, on which we taxpayers are paying an additional $200 billion a year in interest alone, then vote Republican.

But would you please do the rest of us a favor and follow the advice the Republican dirty tricksters put out on fliers circulated in poor neighborhoods back in 2000 and 2004, and wait until the first Wednesday in November to go to the polls?

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June 13, 2008: bonus feature from "History News Network"http://hnn.us/articles/48916.html By Robert S. McElvaine
comments from professional historians who rated Bush the worst president in history:

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No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

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“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

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One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.” Another classified Bush as “an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .” Still another remarked that Bush’s “denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.”

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“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

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“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”

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Four years ago I rated George W. Bush’s presidency as the second worst, a bit above that of James Buchanan. Now, however, like so many other professional historians, I see the administration of the second Bush as clearly the worst in our history. My reasons are similar to those cited by other historians: In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States enjoyed enormous support around the world. President Bush squandered that goodwill by taking the country into an unnecessary war of choice and misleading the American people to gain support for that war. And he failed utterly to have a plan to deal with Iraq after the invasion. He further undermined the international reputation of the United States by justifying torture.

Mr. Bush inherited a sizable budget surplus and a thriving economy. By pushing through huge tax cuts for the rich while increasing federal spending at a rapid rate, Bush transformed the surplus into a massive deficit. The tax cuts and other policies accelerated the concentration of wealth and income among the very richest Americans. These policies combined with unwavering opposition to necessary government regulations have produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Then there is the incredible shrinking dollar, the appointment of incompetent cronies, the totally inexcusable failure to react properly to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, the blatant disregard for the Constitution—and on and on.

Like a majority of other historians who participated in this poll, my conclusion is that the preponderance of the evidence now indicates that, while this nation has had at least its share of failed presidencies, no previous presidency was as large a failure in so many areas as the current one.