Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Wait and see about Obama
From the RoundTable blog
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Courtney Furrow
Furrow, of Roanoke, is a nursing assistant for an Alzheimer's clinic and is a volunteer for Big Brothers and Big Sisters.
Re: the Nov. 21 letter "Bush supporter will give as good as he got":
Matt Merricks states that he only will give President-elect Barack Obama the same respect that has been bestowed upon President George W. Bush.
I seem to remember that in the beginning of Bush's presidency, he was given plenty of respect. The country rallied behind him after Sept. 11, 2001, hoping that this man could restore our nation after a devastating attack. And the best he could come up with was to shop at Wal-Mart. He then led our country into two wars, one of which we never needed to be in in the first place.
He claimed going into Iraq was vengeance for 9/11, yet I'm pretty sure that Osama bin Laden, and not Saddam Hussein, was the mastermind of that operation. Then Bush claimed it was because Iraq had WMDs, which were never found. Not only did he do all this, but he did it against our country's and against the United Nations' wishes.
I think he still received plenty of respect after these blunders, because he was re-elected to a second term. Four years later, here we are still in Iraq, no closer to finding bin Laden, in one of the worst financial crises of our time, with a president who is spending billions of dollars a month in a country where our citizens and their citizens have repeatedly asked to have our troops taken out. And Merricks wants respect for this administration?
If my president, Barack Obama, makes all these mistakes while in the White House, I won't ask Merricks to show him respect at all. But Obama will be Merricks' president, and the majority of the American people see him as a leader who will bring change. I only ask that Merricks give him the same open-mindedness and respect that we, as a nation, gave President Bush at the beginning of his presidency, and wait until the end to see if he makes mistakes before sending disdain his, and our, way.
