Others, not just Bush, deserve blame

I couldn’t help but notice that the last 30 percent of your article titled “Are you better off now?” puts blame on President Bush for “simple quality-of-life issues.”

This doesn’t seem to be appropriate for an article that addresses things like Enron, WorldCom and economic crises.  My belief is that a significant portion of the past decade’s devastating events occurred thanks to our new and far from improved president, who is responsible for most of a national debt of around $12 trillion.

Do you really “anticipate that in 2020 I can say ‘I am better off now than I was 10 years ago’?”

I say quite the contrary.

I have a 9-month-old son, and my concern for him is that the policies of the current administration have the potential to make his future more difficult than it ever could have been otherwise.

I disagreed with President Bush all too often; however, as a graduate student in optometry, I’d like to at least think of myself as a critical thinker, and I believe the true problem with the past decade is not how we handled the beginning but how we let it end. The true issues at hand lie in our national debt and universal health care.

On a similar note, many of the complaints I used to hear about Bush was our continued involvement in Iraq; however, no one seems to be too upset that in November 2009 our U.S. troop count in Iraq was 115,000 even though every other country had pulled out.

At this point, I don’t even know why Bush is being discussed. In my mind, Obama has eclipsed everything that has happened this decade with the exception of 9/11.


Daniel Galle
IU graduate student