Back during the '08 presidential campaign, my take was that then-President Bush had set the bar so low that anyone who took the White House and managed not to put out the sun would be considered a great success. It was sort of tongue-in-cheek, but also somewhat serious. After all, the media cut Bush a lot of slack, reporting obvious crimes as "controversies" and treating the completely unnecessary invasion of Iraq with zero skepticism and 100% orgasmic glee. You'd think that a media so fawning toward the previous president would measure the current one by the same yardstick.But this hasn't been the case. All the excitement that had previously been reserved for the bombing of innocent people for no good reason has now been applied to Obama's approval ratings and a special election in Massachusetts that didn't go the way the pressident's party would've liked. A mere one year in, cable news has all but declared the Obama presidency a failure.
To be fair, I would've liked to see the previous president get the level of scrutiny the current one receives. CNN, for example, has a special project tracking stimulus money. OK, good. But the Bush administration literally shipped pallet loads of money -- 363 tons of bills, totaling $12 billion -- into Iraq, where $8.8 billion of it just disappeared... [Permalink]
