Honestly, you make some valid points but the reality is - a lot of things changed. Bush had a lot of stuff on his plate that he wanted to do in 2000 when he got elected. He had money, he had a good economy, and all of the healthcare reform, education reform, corporate giant prosecuting, etc was capable of being done.

September 11, 2001 changed that though man. It smashed our economy and turned it into a spirally recession. The worst we've seen since the Depression. Job loss rocketed as consumers were afraid to spend any money because we were afraid of Terrorism and the effects it had on us, and to compound the problem we now had a war that we had to fight.

The war on terrorism, that is. I know you say it's no excuse but it really is man. It really is. We had to develop a new plan, a new offensive, reinitiate our intelligence services that had been cut all but to nothing, and we had to do it fast and efficiently. We had no time to waste and no time to allow the money to come in to do this. Where did that come from? Well, frankly, we had no choice but to go in more debt to do this.

I wont sit here and say the timing of the Iraqi war was good, it wasn't. That's a debate all in itself, so I'll give the 87B deficit that he created for that to you guys, as a fault of GWB.

But what I wont give is that he caused the economy to fall, jobs to fail, and the country to "sprial downward" shortly after his election. Look, if it was a country that attacked us, we would have been able to deal with it a lot better and cheaply than the terrorists. The reason being, we were setup to deal with exactly that kind of threat. We were NOT set up intelligence-wise or training wise to deal with the attack of terrorism and the subsequent change in policies to be able to find them, track them, find their money sources, attack them, and remove them from their country's of origin. That had to be created ON THE SPOT with no time to spare, at any cost. To me, it's a cost worth dealing with.

Now, Osama's capture is important; but it is not the end all be all on the war on terrorism, give it time. I'm sure Osama will be captured dead or alive before November, and if he's not -- it doesn't matter all that much because he really isn't in control of his organization anymore anyway.

Back to jobs. While the recent job survey wasn't quite as high as we had liked, the jobs *have* been increasing, and the economy *has* been rebounding at a faster rate than nearly any other time. The quarter before last it grew 8.x%, faster than even during the dot com boom. This quarter it grew 4.x%, again a very high percentage.

Jobs have been increasing, granted last month wasnt the 200,000 expected, but it wasn't a decline either. Unemployment is at a 5.6% rate which is lower than 70% of any other time the unemployment rate has been recorded, in US History. Even during the dot com boom unemployment was only at 5%.

So, jobs are coming back, money is flowing back in and the economy is rebounding, even after a terrible tragedy, a perhaps unecessary war (we have yet to see if it was necessary, so I must assume that there is a possibility it was not, even though i do support it), and a recession that was all but unheard of in US History.

I truely believe that the next 4 years will bring more money, more jobs on a month to month basis (just as they have so far), and once that it on it's way, all of the stuff that Bush wanted to do BEFORE he was dealt such a terrible hand, he will be able to get to it.

I wont sit here and say that he's done everything right, he hasn't. No one does everything right and President Bush is no John F. Kennedy or George Washington, and neither of THEM did everything right. But, Bush has done a pretty good job for this country given the circumstances he's been dealt. Oh, and on a personal level. I got a nice tax refund thanks to president bush. And no, I dont care if the super rich got a bigger refund than me, as far as I'm concerned, they deserve one - just because of all the people trying to scam their money out of them just because they have a lot of it.