Bruce:

As far as I am concerned, you are non grata if you insist on justifying this bad habit of yours. And I think I am within my rights to label your ill-mannered conduct as surly and poltroonish if it is; you have personally earned it. Furthermore, when you use my language to assert your obsessibe rationalization against me, without bringing any sense of differentiation or distinction to bear on the issues, you are already setting the framework as having nothing to do with issues, since you reduce the dialogue to playground-level mockery.

You have made the point that you did not like my frequent forwarding of reports about Bush's inadequacies, idiocies, and criminality, and I am sorry if I stepped on your toes. If you cannot see why he was a bad leader for this nation, despite all the reports both in the Bush threads and since then, then your nose for competency, decency and straight-forward thinking is badly bent.

As far as the critics' attitudes toward the Obama efforts to repair the Bush catastrophe, I can not make an informed judgment. I see a lot of hypotheticals and dire predictions being used as rhetorical devices, but few actual data points being offered. Like Bush, Obama is wading into a very tricky situation and using the best judgement he can make. Unlike Bush he is not resorting to insane violence or cronyism, is not performing in secret, and is not hiding either is decisions or his rationale from the people it will effect.
These things alone make him a better leader, let alone the difference in character. That's my perspective. The actual roll-out of our economic future seems to me to be something we will have to watch as it happens, as I see no-one in all the critical noise who seems qualified or able to offer a fact-based critique combined with pro-active suggestions for improvement.

A