Where's George?

The theme of the Republican National Convention, “We built that,” which is based on a blatant misrepresentation of an Obama statement, should be, “We tried that.”

Conspicuously absent from the speeches up to this point is any mention of two-term president George W. Bush. What’s up with that? Bush implemented many of the policies and plans being pushed by Romney and company today: A tough, shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy, tax cuts for the wealthy, more privatization, more money for the war on drugs, an ongoing assault on public education, using war as a foreign policy tool rather than an act of last resort, more government secrecy, the use of torture, etc., etc. Many of the policies that Romney now champions were already tried by Bush. So why the Bush blackout? Because the Bush presidency was a miserable failure.

Bush took an economic surplus from Clinton and turned it into a black pit of debt eight years later with tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and unlimited defense spending. His tough Texas cowboy personae got us into two wars that we continue to pay for with young people’s lives and enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars. The war on drugs is acknowledged by virtually everyone outside of Washington as a disaster that is causing much more harm than it is preventing, not to mention billions of dollars annually.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Why on God’s green earth would we want a repeat of the Bush years? Folks, we tried it, and it didn’t work. Please, don’t make us go through it again.