since someone just asked, offline, about my use of the term bush-obamaism: i see bush and obama as in some ways continuous. reagan/bush1/clinton were a bit chastened and slow on government expansion. bush and obama are nonstop gogo enthusiasts, despite all their differences. a new bureaucracy for every problem. i love spending and debt. they coincide in some ways, as in federal regulation of k-12 ed: no child etc. and in other respects, they're complementary: bush beefed up the national security apparatus extremely: the department of homeland security, amazing new surveillance programs, and so on. obama will do the same for domestic/welfare/healthcare/environmental programs. notice that obama isn't at all trying to dismantle the bush institutions. so by the time the bush-obama era is over, everybody gets a slice.