If Rip Van Winkle woke up this morning, he’d have seen twelve different variations of this “Miss Me Yet?” meme by second breakfast. They are everywhere. On Facebook, in emails, on photo-shopped billboards, and even on real billboards – the waving and smiling visage of George W. Bush reminding everyone what it once was like to live in an America whose greatest adversary was Osama and not Obama. The vast majority feature George W. Bush, but I’ve also seen them with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and most recently, Richard Milhous Nixon. If you were asking me if I miss any of these men in contrast to the colossal, radioactive spooge-train that is Barack Hussein Obama – then yes, I’d miss the black plague in comparison. But what’s to miss about W? Well, there are a few things.
I miss paying $1.84 for a gallon of gas. I miss having a President who didn’t make capitalism his prison bitch and then swag like Louis the XIV while the peasants starve. I prefer a President who let’s a national crisis marinate for 7 minutes while reading My Pet Goat to 3rd graders to one that plays My Pet Scapegoat for 7 months while America asks, “Where were you during Benghazi?” I prefer the guy who quit golfing after 9/11 to the guy who went to sleep, then went to Vegas while our Ambassador was getting butt-raped by Ansar al-Sharia. I prefer the Commander in Chief who visits our troops in Walter Reed without a camera crew to the one that visits Jay-Z and Beyoncé with one. Give me the guy who ignores the AP to the one who wiretaps them, the guy who uses our intelligence assets against our enemies instead of making enemies of our intelligence assets and the guy who thinks the IRS is the Internal Revenue Service and not the Stasi. I miss waking up and not having to wonder if my wife and children will learn about a gulag or a soup line from firsthand experience.
During the Bush years if you woke up in a cold sweat believing that a closeted Sunni Muslim with Marxist intentions of imploding the economy and banning all that is sacred in this life and the next had compromised your government; well, you’d be dreaming. Today, if you wake up feeling that way, you’re informed. But just because Barack Obama is the worst President in U.S. history and quite possibly, some foreign agency’s best saboteur, doesn’t mean that George Bush was George Washington.
There is one thing though, that truly is commendable about George W. Bush: his interaction with our troops. You can’t fake that. His love and respect for them is genuine and always very moving. And even though I think that he was a huge disappointment, I do believe that he truly loves his country and wants her to succeed. George W. Bush is a good man and a great husband and father but he was not a great President.
Miss me yet? No, Mr. President, I miss my freedom and you did little to ensure that it would exist for the next generation. The only President I have missed in my lifetime is Ronald Reagan; the rest — Republican and Democrat — have been a serious disappointment. Asking me if I miss George W. Bush is like asking a man with melanoma if he misses tanning without sunblock. Sure, those days were more satisfying than today’s chemo session, but prima facie, they’re also the reason that I’ve lost my hair and can’t hold down my lunch.
Bush was clearly not the cancer that is Barack Hussein Obama but his “compassionate conservatism” short-circuited an otherwise healthy immune system. TARP, bailouts, prescription drugs, the Patriot Act – all planted under Bush are yielding the whirlwind under Obama. Turning the other cheek as if he were the Hindu god Brahma, his submission in the second term to the liberal onslaught without fighting or even answering back, left conservatives “Fried, died and throwed to the side.”
