Questions about whether President Obama has been combative enough in dealing with the Republican opposition — or sufficiently ambitious in framing his progressive agenda — seem trivial when viewed in this larger context. Obama is tackling enormous problems that took many years to create, and will take as many or more years to cure. His presidential style is important but its importance pales beside the generally righteous substance of what he’s trying to accomplish, treating what ails the country and its populace while setting into play means and measures to prevent it from ever having such crippling effects thrown upon its unsuspecting people.

It was the Bush administration, you will recall, that sent the national debt into the stratosphere and choked off federal revenue to the point of asphyxiation. Bush and Cheney decided to fight two wars without even accounting — let alone paying — for them. Rather than raise taxes to cover the cost of military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush opted to maintain unreasonable and unnecessary tax cuts.

So far, the wars and the tax cuts have cost the Treasury between $4 trillion and $5 trillion. If Bush had just left income tax rates alone, nobody except Ron Paul would be talking about the debt.

When Bush was campaigning for the White House in 2000, the government was anticipating a projected surplus of roughly $6 trillion over the following decade. Bush said repeatedly that he thought this was too much and wanted to bring the surplus down — hence, in 2001, the first of his two big tax cuts.

Today’s Republicans have perverted Reagan’s philosophy into a kind of anti-government nihilism — an irresponsible, almost childish insistence that the basic laws of arithmetic can be suspended at their will.

The Bush administration also pushed forward Reagan’s policy of deregulation — ignoring, for example, critics who said the ballooning market in mortgage-backed securities needed more oversight. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Bush did regain his faith in government long enough to throw together the $800 billion TARP bailout for the banks. However, he totally failed the American people, those hurt the most from the financial collapse, by refusing to enact a large enough of an aid package to aid struggling Americans on the brink of losing their homes or exact reforms that would ensure that the financial system served the economy.

When Obama enacted the stimulus package, designed to relieve some of the greatest most harmful burdens upon the hardest hit of Americans, Republicans then chastised him for wasting money on a fruitless effort.

Faced with similar circumstances, if Republicans had won the 2008 elections, would today’s Republican leadership react at all? Or is it the party’s view that the proper role of government would be to stand aside and watch the world’s financial system crash and burn?

Just a few weeks ago, the Republican majority in the House threatened to force the United States government to default on its debt obligations as a means of political partisan power plays against the current administration with no thought to the damage that would be inflicted upon the hardest working of Americans in our nation.

The Bush administration took Reagan’s tax-cutting, government-starving philosophy much too far. Today’s Republican Party takes it well beyond, into a rigid absolutism that would be comical if it were not so tragic.

It "is" the Republican base none the less that touts for a stronger economy by losing more revenues to tax cuts and breaks for the wealthiest households and corporations, with less regulatory control over big oil, big pharma and big coal that they claim costs jobs...

...while they still are unable and incompetent enough to come up with a valid righteously effective "jobs bill" themselves. 

It still is the Republican machine that supports massive military spending which the nation can no longer afford, while striving as a means of political policy manipulation to put the country into a governmental shutdown that would cost this country hundreds of millions of dollars per day with further costs for furlough payments, shut downs in projects and programs and then restarting those units later, merely to gain political clout prior to elections in November claiming an inefficient executive administration to blame.

In a country where the words "commie" and "socialist" are used for explosive diatribe for tirades of political opposition against the president...

....let's not forget that the opposition's idea of a "republic" often tends to look far more similar to a "Socialistic Republic of"... with the government more important than the people...and also totally blind to any suggestions to do away with an electorate vote where an official can vote totally opposite of the majority's vote of their state....

...than compared to a Democratic Democrat's society where government is at least FOR the people, the people are important albeit struggling to abide more closely to be interested in a government "by the people".

Even with opponents of the current administration pointing towards failed attempts at economic restoration, bad ideas and loans to unworthy "green power" organizations, how can they ever think that so early on after such a massive failure by the republican engine that killed so many dreams, that we should once again throw our trust in a Republican candidate for the presidency? Do we so easily forget the culprit merely because the decisions for recovery were so unpalatable?  

Never before has the saying, "Jumping from the frying pan into the fire" gained such meaningful definition than if Americans allow a Republican agenda to once again control our society, our country, our nation.

(Some thoughts purposely borrowed from other opinions)