“Roadmap to Greece”, love it!

From The Hill:

Republicans bashed President Obama on Saturday for his “broken” fiscal policies, including his recent budget proposal, which they said would pit America on “a roadmap to Greece.”

In the GOP’s weekly address Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) pointed to high unemployment numbers, a staggeringly high deficit, and high gas prices as evidence that Obama’s economic strategy has failed and was leading the U.S. towards financial ruin.

“If we keep on going like this, the consequences will be devastating,” said McMorris Rogers. “As we’ve learned from Greece and the European Union, no country can escape the costs of big government policies forever. The president’s budget isn’t a blueprint for America – it’s a roadmap to Greece.”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” she continued. “The president and his party have been given numerous opportunities to rein in spending and help create a better environment for job creation, and they’ve punted almost every time.”

Oh, yes, Greece.

What are Obama and the rest of the Democrats thinking?

Much of Obama’s failure to turn the U.S.’s financial state around, McMorris Rogers said, was due to the Democratic philosophy that a strong economy needs to be bolstered by a robust government.

“You see, the president and his party have it all wrong,” she said. “They believe they can grow the economy and create jobs by increasing government spending and raising taxes, including taxes on small businesses.

“But the American people know that the way to grow the economy and create jobs is by cutting government spending and keeping taxes low for all taxpayers.”

Yes, but… but… the American people have no say in any of this, since as we also know, our president is one of those left wingers whose political philosophies would have been better practiced in a different country.

Today’s Morning Bell from Heritage opines spotly on (spot-on-ly? On spotly? Whatever! :-)) regarding Obama’s foreign policy ala Middle East, aptly titling the piece Middle east Crumbles Around Obama’s Foreign Policy.

Thousands are dead in Syria, with more blood spilled each day. Iran is within arm’s reach of a nuclear weapon, threatening Israel’s very existence. And in Egypt, 19 Americans are banned from leaving the country, making them veritable hostages in an unfriendly land [1]. All indications are that the Middle East is crumbling, and President Barack Obama’s foreign policy is collapsing right along with it.

First look toward Homs, Syria — ground zero in the 11-month-old uprising against the brutal government of Bashar al-Assad, which is unleashing death upon its people minute by minute and hour by hour. The United Nations estimates that Assad’s regime has killed more than 5,000 anti-government protesters in the last 11 months, with 200 killed [2] on Friday night alone. The Arab League has stationed observers in country, whose mission was to oversee compliance with a peace plan. That failed.

The Obama Administration rushed to the United Nations Security Council and attempted to pass a resolution calling for Assad to step aside. Predictably, China and Russia laid down a veto. On Monday, the United States finally closed the doors to its embassy [3] in Damascus and withdrew the diplomatic staff over continuing security concerns. Meanwhile, intelligence experts are examining the risk of terrorists [4]gaining control of Syria’s weapons stockpiles should the Assad regime fall.

To the east in Iran, the regime’s full-steam-ahead pursuit of nuclear weapons is reaching a crescendo, with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently remarking [5] that the country could build a bomb within one year and have the means for delivering it one or two years later.

Finally, in Egypt, officials there published a list [6] of 43 people, including 19 Americans, accused of interfering in Egypt’s internal politics. They are not allowed to leave the country and could soon be brought to trial on claims that they illegally funded political groups in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. Heritage’s James Phillips explains [1] that “they have become hostages in a much larger struggle: the struggle for freedom in Egypt against an unholy alliance between Egypt’s transitional military government and the Islamist political parties who will soon assume power.”

President Obama and members of his Cabinet tried to reach Egyptian leaders on the matter [7], but in the words of Lorne Craner, head of the pro-democracy organization IRI, “things are getting worse . . . We are all scratching our heads over here. I did two tours at State and one at the [National Security Council]. If the president called someone, something gets worked out.” But as was the case under President Jimmy Carter, the White House appears helpless while Americans are held captive.

None of these crises occurs in a vacuum — except for the vacuum of a cogent U.S. strategy for dealing with these ever-worsening conditions. Since President Obama took office, he has pursued a diplomatic strategy of charm and restraint: attempting to broker peace between Israel and Palestine, engaging with Syria and Iran, and withdrawing from Iraq. Now we are seeing the results.

One gets the impression that our extremely left leaning, “all politics, all the time” president has completely lost control, like any non manager with no experience to that end who has been promoted to a multi-faceted managerial post: He may hold on for awhile, but eventually the job runs away from him and he finds himself way out of his depth.

Now we have all hell breaking loose all over the Middle East with half these so-called “Arab Spring” states almost surely on their ways into a very HOT Extremist Summer as the fanatics take over. Give it a couple more years for those people to get situated over there, then perhaps the liberals that spawned Obama will come to the realization that the whole “democracy” concept is a farce, that those taking over those countries will largely be anti-U.S. and well disposed toward doing some unpleasant things about it.

But I suppose I’m straying a bit.

Read the entire Heritage Foundation article.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, from Stephen Moore, there is a “Fairness Quiz” for the president.

President Obama has frequently justified his policies—and judged their outcomes—in terms of equity, justice and fairness. That raises an obvious question: How does our existing system—and his own policy record—stack up according to those criteria?

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country’s income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?

Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?

Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

Read On…

What the %#@&*% are these liberals doing to this great country, and when will they decide they’ve done enough!?

From Caroline Glick:

In recent months, a curious argument has surfaced in favor of US President Barack Obama. His supporters argue that Obama’s foreign policy has been a massive success. If he had as much freedom of action on domestic affairs as he has on foreign affairs, they argue, his achievements in all areas would be without peer.

Expressing this view, Karen Finney a former Democratic spokeswoman who often defends the party in the US media told the Huffington Post, “Look at the progress the president can make when he doesn’t have Republicans obstructing him.”

Yeah, sure…

{SNIP!}

The failure of Obama’s foreign policies to date has been nowhere more evident than in the Middle East.

Take Iraq for instance. Obama and his supporters claim that the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq is one of his great accomplishments. By pulling out, Obama kept his promise to voters to end the war in “a responsible manner.” And as the polling data indicate, most Americans are willing to give him credit for the move.

But the situation on the ground is dangerous and getting worse every day. Earlier this month, just ahead of the departure of the last US forces from Iraq, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki visited with Obama at the White House. Immediately after he returned home, the Shiite premier began a ruthless campaign against his Sunni coalition partners in a no-holds barred bid to transform the Iraqi government and armed forces into partisan institutions controlled by his Dawa Party.

Forces commanded by Maliki’s son arrested and allegedly tortured several of the Sunni Vice President Tariq al Hashimi’s bodyguards. They forced the guards to implicate Hashimi in terror plots. Maliki subsequently issued an arrest warrant for Hashimi. So too, he issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh Mutlaq and fired him without permission from the Iraqi parliament.

Hashimi and Mutlaq are now in hiding in Erbil. Maliki is demanding that the Kurdish regional government extradite them to Baghdad for trial.

Maliki’s actions have driven Sunni leaders in the Sunni provinces of Diyala, Anbar and Salahadin to demand autonomy under Iraq’s federal system. He has responded by deploying loyal forces to the provinces to fight the local militias.

The situation is so explosive that three prominent Sunni leaders, former prime minister Ayad Allawi, who heads the Iraqiya party, Parliament Speaker Osama Nujaifi, and Finance Minister Rafe al-Essawi published an op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday begging Obama to rein in Maliki in order to prevent Iraq from plunging into civil war.

No doubt these “pleas” will fall on deaf ears as Obama continues to define our troops’ withdrawal from Iraq a master stroke or whatever on his part.

Then there is Egypt. Obama’s decision in February to abandon then president Hosni Mubarak, the US’s most dependable ally in the Arab world in favor of the protesters in Tahrir Square was hailed by his supporters as a victory for democracy and freedom against tyranny. By supporting the protesters against the US ally, Obama argued that he was advancing US interests by showing the Muslim world the US favored the people over their leaders.

Ten months later, the Egyptian people have responded to this populist policy by giving jihadist parties a two-thirds majority in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. For the first time in thirty years, the strategic anchor of US power in the Arab world — the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty — is in danger. Indeed, there is no reason to believe it will survive.

Continuing,

As to Iran, Obama’s policies have brought about a situation where the regime in Teheran does not fear a US military strike on its nuclear installations. Obama’s open opposition to the prospect of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations has similarly convinced the regime that it can proceed without fear in its nuclear project.

Iran’s threat this week to close the Straits of Hormuz in the event that the US imposes an embargo on Iranian oil exports is being widely characterized by the US media as a sign of desperation on the part of the regime. But it is hard to see how this characterization aligns with reality. It is far more appropriate to view Iran’s easy threats as a sign of contempt for Obama and for US power projection under his leadership.

If Iran’s ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons are thwarted, it will be despite Obama, not because of him.

Then there is the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Due to Obama’s unbridled hostility towards Israel, there is no chance whatsoever that Israel and the PLO will reach a peace deal for the foreseeable future. Instead, Fatah and Hamas have agreed to unify their forces. The only thing standing in the way of a Hamas takeover of the PLO is the US Congress’s threat to cut off US aid to the Palestinian Authority. For his part, Obama has gone out of his way to discredit the Congressional threat by serving as an indefatigable lobbyist for maintaining US financial support for the PA.

Still more…

Of course, the Middle East is not the only region where the deleterious consequences of Obama’s foreign policy are being felt. From Europe, to Africa, to Asia, to Latin America, Obama’s determination to embrace US adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez has weakened pro-US forces and strengthened US foes.

Barack Hussein Obama, chimpion of foreign policy.

Read the rest of the column.

From Heritage. org:

You wouldn’t know it if you solely paid attention to the mainstream media, but while President Barack Obama attempts to sell the country on hundreds of billions in new stimulus spending and $1.5 trillion in new taxes, his Administration is smack in the middle of several growing scandals: the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle and the crony capitalism wrongdoing involving Solyndra and LightSquared.

In the fall of 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which is overseen by President Obama’s Department of Justice, launched an effort to sell weapons to small-time gun buyers in the hopes of tracing them to major weapons traffickers along the southwestern border and into Mexico. Their effort, which is known as Operation Fast and Furious, failed terribly.

Around 1,500 of the guns went unaccounted for, about two-thirds of those guns ended up in Mexico, a border patrol agent was shot and killed with weapons that were sold as part of the operation, 57 Fast and Furious weapons have been connected to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., and in Mexico an unconfirmed toll of at least 200 people have been killed or wounded with other weapons linked to the botched effort.

Save for recent reports from CBS News and the Los Angeles Times, and earlier reporting by ABC News, the mainstream media has largely ignored the story and the White House press corps has not bothered to ask the President or press secretary Jay Carney about the scandal since July 5 — that’s 78 days, and over 40 press briefings, without one single related question.

Meanwhile, congressional hearings were held, top officials associated with the operation were removed from their positions, and a third individual resigned. In the latest news, Mexican officials are complaining that, to this day, the United States has not offered an explanation about Fast and Furious, much less an apology. And yesterday, CBS News reported that a series of secretly recorded audio tapes thought to have been recorded in March reveal that an Arizona gun dealer and an ATF agent involved in the operation were worried about the unraveling scandal.

Okay, there’s one we’ve mentioned in a past post.

As if it weren’t enough, however,

Turning from guns to butter, another scandal has cropped up, this one involving the solar panel manufacturing company Solyndra, which received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Energy Department as part of President Obama’s green jobs spending spree. The President lauded the company when he spoke at the unveiling of its new factory in May of last year. But now, little more than a year later, it stands bankrupt and plans to lay off more than 1,000 employees. Days after it filed for bankruptcy, the FBI raided the company’s offices and the homes of its executives.

The Obama Administration had a lot riding on Solyndra and the promise it offered. The President had made “green” energy a centerpiece of his failed plan to boost job growth in the United States, likening his effort to America’s “moonshot”–the space race following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. The import of the company’s bankruptcy was evident in a January 31 e-mail between Office of Management and Budget staff regarding “Solyndra optics.” In the e-mail, the staff discussed what it would look like if the company went belly-up down the road, its implications for the 2012 elections, and how an earlier default might give the Obama Administration some credit for “fiscal discipline.”

Meanwhile,

Then there’s the story of LightSquared, a wireless start-up company backed by billionaire Democratic donor Philip Falcone. The Daily Beast reports that military officials fear that the company’s technology could interfere with GPS signals–and that “two U.S. officials allege the White House tried to influence their [congressional] testimony to rush key testing, to LightSquare’s benefit.”

Enter the investigations. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Tuesday that his committee plans to investigate government loans to private companies made by the Obama Administration, according to The Hill. “I want to see when the president and his cronies are picking winners and losers,” Issa said. Now, Reuters reports that Solyndra’s chief executive and chief financial officer will invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer questions at the hearing on Friday.

Is this what happens when “we” (quotes denote “not me, but the voting kollective“) elect as president a man of unknown character from a political environment renowned for its shameless, blatant corruption because of his race and because he lays out a smooth line of B.S.

A cross-border gun-running scandal, deaths in the United States and Mexico, staff removals and resignations, secret audio recordings, complaints from foreign officials, hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, bankruptcy, an FBI raid, campaign donors, and allegations of inappropriate White House influence in congressional testimony. There are serious questions coming out of Washington. It’s time the media start demanding answers.

If a conservative had been in the White House, you can bet your bottom dollar the mainstream media would have been “demanding answers” for quite some time now.

Here’s the entire column.

From a column by Robert McNight in the Washington Times:

The Constitution of the United States, whose adoption we celebrate every Sept. 17, clearly lists the powers of each branch of the national government. Let’s take a look at what Barack Obama, like any president, is empowered to do and see if it squares with his actions. In Article II, Section 1, he is sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Section 2 names the president as commander in chief of the armed forces, grants him the power to make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate and to appoint ambassadors, federal judges, Cabinet officials and other federal officers. Section 3 says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

In his two years and nine months in office, President Obama has compiled a spectacular record of noncompliance with the Constitution. Here are just some of the ways his administration has failed to execute the laws while using raw, unauthorized power:

A few “snips”:

The 15th Amendment: Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department has effectively become a race-based enforcement unit. After New Black Panther Party members were caught on tape intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008, the Justice Department declined to defend the convictions and thus sent the message that baton-wielding thuggishness on Election Day is no big deal. Former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams, who laid out the case before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, described the administration’s dismissal of charges as “lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.”

Well!

Illegal Immigration: The Obama administration has ignored the illegal actions of “sanctuary cities” and sued the state of Arizona in July 2010 for enforcing federal law. Then, last month, the administration announced a new policy that, in effect, ends enforcement of illegal immigration, providing the illegal alien meets the requirements of the Dream Act, a bill Congress failed to pass. So, Mr. Obama is ignoring current federal law while creating rules based on a law that never passed.

Hmmmmm.

The Fifth Amendment: The Constitution guarantees that no one is deprived of his or her property without “due process of law” or “just compensation.” The National Labor Relations Board’s absurd order to the Boeing Co. not to open a newly built $750-million Dreamliner facility in right-to-work South Carolina, because unions in Boeing’s home state of Washington object, violates that guarantee. Even liberal New York Times columnist Joseph Nocera commented, “Seriously, when has a government agency ever tried to dictate where a company makes its products? I can’t ever remember it happening.”

Wow!

The entire column.

I guess this means that all those liberals who defend and even praise Obama and would vote for his reelection don’t have much use for the Constitution, either.

A Democrat, that is, to finally preside over the downgrading of America’s credit rating.

From the Washington Times:

The Obama administration has made history by presiding over the first-ever downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. President Obama has outdone all his predecessors in wrecking America’s good name. His answer to this problem: Spend even more.

Raising the debt ceiling was sold as a way of guaranteeing the U.S. credit rating. It had the opposite effect, which makes sense to anyone who understands credit. Take a family with a median household income around $50,000. If they spend $85,000 a year and have debt at $300,000 and growing, it’d be foolish to let them borrow more because they don’t have the income to pay it back. Raising the debt ceiling ignored this reality. Then, the Obama administration immediately demonstrated its utter lack of creditworthiness by blowing 60 percent of the initial $400 billion increase in one day, the largest single-day accumulation of debt in U.S. history.

While they don’t have Bush to kick around anymore, they kick at him just the same, not out of any sense of vindictiveness, but because one of the hallmarks of today’s liberal dominated Democrats is that taking responsibility for their actions is unheard of, and since Bush has been the all purpose pin cushion for blame since the Obama Empire Administration began, why stop now?

The White House blames the George W. Bush administration for every economic woe, but the numbers speak for themselves. In 2008, the federal budget deficit was around 3 percent of gross domestic product. In 2011, it’s around 11 percent. Total federal debt was $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008 and is currently $14.6 trillion. Debt as a percentage of GDP was a painful 69 percent at the end of the Bush years, but Mr. Obama is pushing it over 100 percent, another disgraceful historic milestone. A record 45.8 million are on food stamps, and the percentage of working-aged Americans who have jobs is the lowest in three decades. According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, in late January, 44 percent of Americans felt the economy was getting better, and 52 percent thought it was worsening. Now only 17 percent have a positive view; 77 percent understand our economy is nosediving.

Well, like the opening line of the linked article says, The Obama administration has made history…

Not the kind of history most presidents would want to be remembered for, but from Obama’s point of view, at least it’s some kind of change.

This Washington Times Op-Ed carries the by-line of one Dr. Milton R. Wolf, no relation to my hubby, but a cousin of President Barack Obama’s.

Well!

Something unexpected happened along the president’s breezy cruise to re-election. “No drama” Obama is suddenly looking about as calm as Jerry Lewis in a French film, about as brave as Ted Kennedy after an evening drive through Chappaquiddick. Witness Team Obama’s recent panicky behavior.

No cousinly partiality here, is there?

Obamanomics anxiety. The White House is reeling as its reverse Midas touch to the economy is being exposed. Its own economists acknowledge now that each job created or “saved” by the so-called “stimulus” cost taxpayers a whopping $278,000. This is still fantasyland because there are 1.9 million fewer jobs on record now than on the day the stimulus was signed into law, but nonetheless, the quiet pre-holiday Friday night news dump of an announcement reveals the administration’s worry. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke admitted last month that he’s clueless why America’s economic malaise continues. Tax cheat and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who called President Obama’s budget “unsustainable,” wants to abandon ship along with the rest of the “economic dream team” escapees: Lawrence H. Summers, Christina Romer and Austan Goolsbee. Meanwhile, the president, apparently believing no news is good news, has put his fingers in his ears - “La la la, I cannot hear you” - and, at one point, canceled his daily economic briefings.

Obamacare waivers wild ride. That the White House would exempt its best friends from Obamacare underscores everything you need to know not only about the deeply flawed health care takeover itself but also about the White House’s embrace of cronyism. Team Obama vigorously defended those waivers right up until the moment when political expediency forced the president to wave them goodbye. About 1,400 “Get out of jail free” cards later, he thinks you will forget that his union friends were exempted from the rules you must follow. Parenthetically, look for those waivers to return quietly at some point under a new Obama Ministry of Truth name. Perhaps in accordance with the creative euphemism the administration chose for its Libyan war, it will call them “kinetic medical actions.”

Dr. Wolf definitely covers all the bases in describing the ills of his cousin’s administration.

Read the rest.

On another note, as I walked around Manhattan yesterday, I saw a young man wearing a tee shirt Seth would have wanted to purchase immediately, right off the wearer’s back if necessary, and my big, bad Wolf would have chuckled over. It said, Nuke The Whales

Since our president has come into office (actually before he came into office, if his attendance for decades at the pro-Palestinian terrorist, anti-Israel Reverend Wright’s church is any indicator), he has made it abundantly clear that he is just chaffing at the bit to aid his Arab friends in their quest to put an end to Israel once and for all.

The only thing holding him back from going all out in an anti-semitic frenzy, in my opinion, is the fact that most American voters and indeed most American politicians of either major party look upon the Jewish state as a friend and ally of the United States.

From a column by Wesley Pruden in today’s Jewish World Review, a favorite read of Seth’s when he’s around (Hmm, that hasn’t been for awhile now, but we’re praying that he’ll be back soon and everything will again be as it was):

Another tough decision is coming up for Barack Obama. This one ought to be easy, even for the ditherer-in-chief. But before he decides to do the right thing he’ll need all the bicarbonate of soda in the White House pantry.

The Arab League, on whom the United States and the “great powers” of Europe depend for the moral authority to impose the no-fly zone over Libya, now wants the United Nations to impose a similar no-fly zone over Gaza, whence the Palestinians fire their rockets at Israeli schoolchildren. The Israelis, naturally, fire back with air strikes. This inconveniences the Palestinian rocket batteries no end, of course, and the Arab League is eager for someone, since the Arabs have never been able to do it, to make the Israelis submit to their own destruction.

How do you say it? Oh, yes SNIP!

President Obama has peopled his administration with prominent policy-makers and aides who wear their hostility to Israel like Easter finery. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is a passionate and impetuous critic of America’s only reliable ally in the Middle East. Samantha Power, the senior director for multilateral affairs (this is not as naughty as it sounds) at the National Security Council, once in a fit of little-foot stamping proposed landing a “mammoth force” of American troops to protect the Palestinians from Israel. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is appropriately diplomatic in her present incarnation, but as the first lady she famously embraced Suha Arafat, widow of Yasser Arafat, with hugs and kisses at a rally in the Middle East in 1999.

Here’s the column in its entirety.

Now, I suppose, we wait and see how the “Ditherer-In-Chief” responds.

…Victor Davis Hanson must be shared. I rarely post an entire column, but this one is just so… so…

Well, it’s titled, appropriately enough, Rethinking George Bush?

Former President George W. Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon. In reaction, for nearly two years President Barack Obama won easy applause by prefacing almost every speech on his economic policies with a “Bush did it” put-down.

But suddenly Bush seems OK. Last week, the president did the unthinkable: He praised Bush for his past efforts to reach out to Muslims. Vice President Joe Biden went further and blurted out, “Mr. Bush deserves a lot of credit.” Biden topped that off with, “Mr. President, thank you.”

Even liberal pundits have now called on Bush to help Obama diffuse rising tensions over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and Arizona’s illegal immigration law.

What’s going on?

For one thing, recent polls show an astounding rebound in the former president’s favorability — to the extent that in the bellwether state of Ohio, voters would rather still have Bush as president than Obama by a 50-42 margin. Nationwide, Obama’s approval ratings continue to sink to near 40 percent — a nadir that took years for Bush to reach. It has become better politics to praise rather than to bury Bush.

Iraq seems on the road to success, with a growing economy and a stabilizing government. Don’t take my word on that; ask Vice President Biden. He recently claimed that the way Iraq is going, it could become one of the Obama administration’s “greatest achievements.”

Obama himself seconded that when the former war critic called the American effort in Iraq “a remarkable chapter” in the history of the two countries.

Then there are the growing comparisons with Bush’s supposed past transgressions.

Compared to Obama, they’re starting to look like traffic tickets now. Take the economy and the war on terror. Americans were angry at the Bush-era deficits. But they look small after Obama trumped them in less than two years.

For six years of the Bush administration, Americans enjoyed a strong economy. So far, there hasn’t been a similar month under Obama. Bush had a one-time Wall Street meltdown, but Obama’s permanent big-government medicine for it seems far worse than the original disease.

If Hurricane Katrina showed government ineptness, so did the recent BP oil spill. Maybe such problems in the Gulf were neither Bush nor Obama’s fault alone, but are better attributed to the inept federal bureaucracy itself — or to freak weather and human laxity.

On the war on terror, Obama has dropped all the old campaign venom. Bush’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility, renditions, tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, predator drone attacks, and policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are no longer dubbed a shredding of the Constitution. All are now seen as national security tools that must be kept, if not expanded, under Obama.

In comparison to Obama and his gaffes, Bush no longer seems the singular clod whom his opponents endlessly ridiculed. The supposedly mellifluent Obama relies on the teleprompter as if it were his umbilical cord. His occasional word mangling (he pronounced “corpsman” as “corpse-man”) and weird outbursts (he recently complained that opponents “talk about me like a dog”) remind us that the pressures of the presidency can make a leader sometimes seem silly.

Bush now seems cool because he has played it cool. The more Obama and Biden have trashed him, the more silent and thus magnanimous he appears. Bush’s post-presidency is not like that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton — both have criticized their successors and hit the campaign trail — but similar to that of his father, who worked with, rather than harped about, Bill Clinton. That graciousness not only has helped George W. Bush in the polls, but it finally seems to be mellowing out Obama as well.

Criticism of Bush got out of hand the last few years of his term. Writing novels or making documentaries about killing the president, or libeling him as a Nazi, is not the sort of politics that we want continued during the Obama years. So it makes sense before the general election to halt the endless blame-gaming, before what goes around comes around.

The frenzy of Bush hatred and Obama worship that crested in the summer of 2008 is over. We now better remember the Bush at Ground Zero with a megaphone and his arm around a fireman than the Texan who pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” Meanwhile, hope-and-change now seems to offer little hope and less change.

America woke up from its 2008 trance and is concluding that Bush was never as bad, and Obama never as good, as advertised.

Well done, sir!