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Pretending Bush's presidency never happened

I've heard and read numerous comments from Republicans that President Obama has done nothing but whine and blame his predecessor - George W. Bush - for everything. In conjunction with that, Dubya didn't appear at the Republican National Convention. It's as if Republicans want to pretend that those 8 years he was in office never happened.

Believe me - I want to pretend that George W. Bush was never president either; however - he was. We can't just overlook the 8 years he was in the Oval Office and suggest that his decisions between 2001-2009 hasn't had any effect on us between the years of 2009-2012.

When Bush left office in January of 2009, we were losing between 700,000 and 800,000 jobs a month. As we added close to 100,000 jobs in August of 2012 - marking the 23rd consecutive month in which we've seen such growth, are we to blame Obama for the lost jobs before he was president and praise Bush for the added jobs after Obama stepped into office? Republicans rationale on this is absurd.

Let's say a new teacher gets hired at a high school. The class average began falling a few months prior to him/her taking over the reins. It's steadily fallen to 60% or a low D. While not many significant improvements are made in the teacher's first couple weeks or so, slowly but surely, the class average begins to rise and by the end of the school year, it's risen to 75% or a C. While the class average may be lower than the school's ultimate goal, are the students not making progress and shouldn't the teacher maintain his/her job to hopefully continue said progress? Doesn't that teacher have a right to be disappointed by the previous professor, since he's/she's helped improved the class average so substantially? Since the class average hasn't risen quickly enough, should the school fire this teacher and go back to the original or someone exactly like him or her and see what happens?

While there can be no denying the fact that job-growth in this country has been coming along more gradually than some would like, we've seen 23 consecutive months of job growth. Do Republicans truly believe that with all this progress we're making, no matter how gradual it's been, that we should go back to a candidate very similar to the one who got us into this mess in the first place and who ended his presidency seeing between 700,000 and 800,000 jobs lost? As he noted in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, President Obama admitted to making mistakes during his presidency. He has not solely blamed the Bush Administration for all of our economic woes. However, he's only been in office 4 years as opposed to 8 for President George W. Bush and while Bush was losing between 700,000 and 800,000 jobs a month at the end of his tenure, President Obama has seen job-growth for 23 consecutive months. No wonder the GOP is trying to deny George W. Bush's presidency in the lead-up to this election.

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