Give it time?

Weeks into the US invasion of Iraq, and the liberals were already calling it a quagmire and a "Vietnam". When Bush and friends started pushing for a troop surge, the left couldn't help but bash the idea and continued to do so until the success of the surge became so utter obvious that anyone who spoke against it was effectively pasting a giant "Moron" sign to his forehead. It is obvious to anyone with an objective view that the Democrats were invested in failure in Iraq. Why shouldn't they be? Bush's legacy would forever be fused with the success or failure in Iraq, of course the democrats would want to push it towards the failure direction, that is just good political strategy (even though it dances on the edge of treason).

Now the role is reversed. Obama has attached his name and his legacy to the pork-laden 700+ billion dollar stimulus bill that was designed with the express purpose of preventing a major recession from occuring. While never as ruthless as the democrats, conservatives and republicans are up in arms calling this stimulus a failure, while the democrats led by Obama, are calling for patience in a very Bush-esqe fashion. So now the question is whether or not this is just politics as usual? Are the republicans calling this a failure because it is, or because they really want it to be?

Lets be honest, if someone like Mitt Romney had been elected as POTUS (one can only dream), and he was implementing a more market-driven recovery program, republicans and conservatives would not be expecting full recovery a mere six months later, and we would probably be crying for patience in the same way. However, we would see some indications that it was working. The US occupation of Iraq lasted five years, but after one month Baghdad had been captured and Saddam had been deposed, another 3 months and Saddams sons had been killed and another 5 months and Saddam himself was captured. Whether you felt the war was justified or not, you can't deny that the military was progressing and making headway, the fact that they underestimated the amount of civil unrest notwithstanding.

It has been 6 months now since Obama signed his stimulus bill into law. Since that time the average unemployment rate has risen 4 percentage points (some parts of the country it is approaching 20%), translating into millions of lost jobs. Despite Obama and friends constant reassurances that the stimulus is "working as intended" what evidence can they show to that effect? GM still went bankrupt despite the billions of taxpayer dollars dumped into it, Banks still aren't lending money, despite their almost forced bailout, and now the state of California, like the Titanic is sinking fast and threatening to pull the whole country down in its wake. Where, Mr. President, is any indication that the stimulus is working? Please show me something...anything that I can look at that indicates that the economy will recover faster because of the near-trillion dollars you and your love-slave congress have dumped into it?

Or...am I to assume that "working as intended" means that the purpose of the stimulus was to sink the American economy even further.