Bush Refuses To Be Idle
By Dwight Baker (01/19/04)
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” is how I think the popular saying goes. One thing I’m increasingly convinced of is that President George W. Bush refuses to be idle.
No President can please all the people all the time. No matter what policies he proposes, someone’s going to feel slighted, and if they’re a member of the left, you just know they’ll attack.
Real leaders reject the status quo and make the hard decisions, even if it’s not necessarily popular or can damage that leader politically. Presidents must do the right thing for the country while politicians only care about being re-elected. George W. Bush apparently doesn’t care about being re-elected judging from the criticism he constantly receives from the left and even some staunch conservatives.
Here are some of the more visible decisions he’s made.
War on Terror (Afghanistan/Iraq)
This one’s a given. The majority of America approved of the war and continues to approve of the job Bush is doing. You only know that if your eyes are open and you don’t get all your news from the “all bad news, all the time” sources such as CNN, The New York Times, or the network anchors. But you cannot deny there’s a large chunk of the population that opposed it and still oppose it. I can respect those whose opposition is based on their analysis of the facts and they’ve come to the conclusion it’s wrong. People who are just anti-war and adhere strictly to pacifism as a philosophy, I’m fine with that, too. At least they’re honest. The people I don’t respect are those who feel they have to oppose whatever a conservative Republican does, no matter what it is, simply to play politics. Sometimes I think if Bush declared the sky blue the left would immediately hold a press conference to argue against it.
The reality is Iraq’s been an official target of the United States since the Clinton administration. The "Iraq Liberation Act of 1998" was signed into LAW on Oct. 31, 1998 by President Clinton. September 11, 2001 was still three years away and George W. Bush was still focused on being governor of Texas. After a decade of appeasement was proven to be the wrong way to handle terrorists or terrorist-supporting nations on 9/11, Bush had enough. No longer would we sit and wait and wring our hands while killers plotted against us. Saddam’s ouster was a long time coming as well as the Taliban’s. Saddam was too arrogant to run and hide, thinking he could defeat the U.S. Only in the end did he choose Osama bin Laden’s tried and true technique of hiding in holes.
Illegal Immigration issue (Election year pandering or real leadership?
This is one of those issues that has spawned debate for decades and it’s become a problem so large that there’s no one correct way of dealing with it. The only thing everyone can agree on is that it must be dealt with. We have to start somewhere. Liberals who have longed for an amnesty program for illegal immigrants think it’s a great idea. They’re just sorry a Republican president came up with it, so they HAVE to oppose it. Principles go out the door when they’re over-ridden by hate. Hard-line conservatives are against it because if they had their way, we’d “round ‘em all up and send ‘em home”!
There are 8-12 MILLION estimated illegal immigrants….er, uh……undocumented workers, sorry……here in the U.S. It’s logistically impossible to send them all home. It’s not realistic. So Bush has proposed a worker program giving illegals a chance to earn a living filling jobs us fat, lazy Americans are too proud to do (I’m not buying that one) while being put on the path to legal status.
The details have been discussed ad nauseum so I won’t bore you with that but Bush’s plan is SOMETHING and a lot more than Clinton or Bush Sr. ever did. This president won’t turn a blind eye to it. He’s at least attempting to address it. And even if it is to pander to the Hispanic vote during an election year, I can at least appreciate that it’s another issue stolen from Democrats they’ve been afraid to touch.
What I wish everyone would remember is that so far, Bush’s proposal is just that: a proposal. He still has to sell Congress on the idea and they still have to find a way to pay for it. So you know the immigration plan that comes out the business end of Congress will look different than what went in.
And that, too, goes for the next subject.
Bush’s Vision for NASA
In between my stellar commentaries, I spend my days working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston so I was obviously very interested in Bush’s plan for NASA he proposed on January 14th. But I’ll be honest. I hate listening to Bush’s speeches. He’s just not the great communicator that Reagan or even Clinton was. And this speech surely wasn’t on par with Kennedy’s. But it’s yet another example of real leadership after years of neglect.
Clinton bragged to Larry King after last year’s Columbia tragedy that he supported NASA and increased NASA’s budget. In reality, he increased it only once during his 8 year reign and then only by $200 million dollars, not even enough for one single space shuttle launch. If dollars were rocket fuel, the shuttle would clear the tower, complete it’s roll program. And that’s it!
But just like everything else Bush proposes, he was quickly attacked. Polls were taken everywhere and mostly split down the middle. But polls are only as good as people who give them, depending on their political views. It made a difference who was said to be behind the plan. When half the poll sample was asked about a "Bush administration" plan to expand space exploration instead of the "United States" plan, opposition increased. Just over half of Democrats opposed the plan by "the United States." Once it was identified as a "Bush administration" plan, Democrats opposed it by a 2-to-1 margin. How transparent is that?
Most of those people I heard or read about who were opposed to the plan appeared to be those who don’t normally have an interest in anything space-related to begin with…..until there’s an accident. The argument I kept hearing was “how can we spend billions and billions on a space program when there are children starving and people needing health care?”
Such sophistry.
These people need to be whacked with a big stick called ‘perspective’. During NASA’s glory days of the Apollo moon-shots, NASA’s budget was 0.8 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Not even 1 percent!! Today, NASA’s budget is a FRACTION of 0.1 percent. So apparently to these folks, the other 99.9% isn’t enough to tackle all the country’s problems.
NASA's budget is $15.5 billion for 2004. Bush’s proposal is for an additional $1 billion over five years with $11 billion of the existing NASA budget reallocated to support the new mission. With all that, NASA’s budget would STILL be less than 1 percent of the overall GDP. And according to some experts around here at NASA, it still wouldn’t really be enough, but we’ve gotten used to being asked to do more with less.
I even have to deal with Bush-bashers here at work. And considering their education, I’m still surprised at the idiocy revealed in their political statements. A lady said after watching Bush’s speech commented on the part of the plan proposing retiring the shuttle around 2010. She said, “he’ll be lucky if he’s still in office in 2010.” Lucky indeed, since he’d have to win a THIRD term as president to still be in office then.
And she has a degree in physics?
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