The Blame Game

Maybe he started it.

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I have a family member who is a staunch Republican and while Bush was in office, whenever something negative would hit the news about Bush, this family member would quickly say that it wasn’t necessarily Bush’s fault—it was something that Bill Clinton started and Bush had to live with it, thus we should blame Clinton for whatever it might be.

Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Obama supporters are doing the very same thing. It happened several months ago when it was discovered that Obama supported the library record provision in the PATRIOT Act, and now it’s coming into play with the top-secret gag order in the case of Doe v. Holder, in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation was ordered to justify a gag order. They did justify it, but even the justification was done so in secret.

A story from Ars Technica on the case refers to the FBI’s “Bush-era secrecy,” and I found it amusing because Obama has been in office for about five months and the Democrats have control of Congress. Their supporters have given them credit for “stimulating” the economy and trying to save the auto industry. This weekend the House passed a bill that will supposedly help stop global warming. (It’s also going to cost each family of four roughly $6,800 in taxes by the year 2035 and about $161 billion by 2020 for the economy as a whole, but we can probably afford it given our great economy.)

Maybe we can just push everything back a few more administrations and just say, “George Washington started it.”

ReferencesStokes, Jon. “FBI Compounds Mystery with Secret Justification of Gag Order.” Ars Technica. 25 June 2009.

“The Cap and Tax Fiction.” Wall Street Journal. 26 June 2009.

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