Tea Party Nation is out with another piece of misinformation attacking President Obama. In “The Do-Nothing President and his awesome vacation”, founder Judson Phillips is once again attack the President for taking a vacation, something that has become the norm for the right. Phillips is also taking a preemptive strike against the counter point of Bush vacationing (subscription required):
When we conservatives mention Obama and his frequent vacations, liberals will pipe up with, “Well you didn’t complain when George Bush took vacations.
You know, we did not complain when George Bush took vacations. When he took his vacations, he generally returned to his ranch in Crawford Texas.
But the real issue is, when George Bush was taking his vacations down to Crawford, unemployment was below 5%. When George Bush was taking his vacations, the economy was growing new jobs at a record pace. When George Bush took his vacations the country was prospering.
Sure unemployment was down at this point in Bush’s presidency, but you know what wasn’t? War!
Presidents have a tight limit on what they can do to stimulate the economy. Most of what needs to happen relies upon Congress. Remember a few months ago when Obama was unveiling his new jobs program? He had to delay it because John Boehner threw a hissy fit. One of the big issues was that “Congress isn’t in session that day”. Under John Boehner our Congress has taken an almost unprecedented number of days off. Where’s the outrage from the right on that?
But there is something a President does have a lot of control over and that is war. He is the Commander in Chief per our Constitution. When Bush was playing cowboy all the time, we were seeing Iraq slip into total chaos and the number of our soldiers dying skyrocketing. Instead of being a commander, Bush decided to take vacations.
No mention of that from the right.
So how much vacation has Obama taken compared to other President? Well I decided to look for the numbers and found some CBS did in August. I decided to put them into a nice chart:
Wow! When you look at that it appears that the Republicans love their vacations a lot more than Democrats. Bush had actually taken almost 3 times the vacation as Obama in the same point in his presidency and more than 6 times that of Clinton.
The Gipper isn’t innocent either. He had taken double what Obama did and there’s something important to note in there. During this same time frame in Reagan’s administration we saw unemployment hovering close to 11%. It was worse than it has been under Obama.
Why don’t TPN mention that? Is it because these were Republicans or maybe it’s because they were white? I really don’t know and don’t want to hear their excuse because it’s going to be so far off the actual fact path that GPS won’t even help them get back.
I said it early in 2009. President Obama could cure cancer, totally get rid of regulation and taxes, end all wars and made sure every single person in this country had their dream job and the right would still complain. They do not care about the people or country. The only thing they care about is getting Obama out of office. It’s one of the nastiest forms of hatred there is because they are afraid to admit a lot of it has to do with race.