The vegetable garden is just one in a whole string of great new Obama values.

The ABC News Headline trumpets, “Foodies Celebrate White House Veggie Garden.”

I didn’t know I was a “foodie” before this. But I must be. I’m celebrating. You can see our little community garden plot below:

It’s not that I expect the White House to contribute enough to our national agricultural output to pull us out of the Bush Depression. It’s that this is just the latest in a series of moves that telegraph a totally new attitude. And this kind of attitude is what might pull us out of the Bush Depression.

By contrast, I recall Bush visiting his dad at his exclusive oceanfront estate early in his administration. The two of them celebrated by burning up a few hundred gallons of gasoline zooming up and down the coast in his dad’s Cigarette boat (a craft highly favored by drug runners for it’s incredible – and obscenely wasteful – speed).

Some of Obama’s recent “value” changes:

• He has pledged to use science to guide policy, not politics. And he’s backed that up by appointing Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy and reversing Bush’s stem cell research opposition.
• The US will sign the United Nations declaration to decriminalize homosexuality just months after Bush refused to. Some nations execute gays, others throw them in prision and torture them. Did Bush care? Evidently not. Obama does care.
• The Feds in the Obama Administration will stop interferring with legitimate, licensed medicinal Marijuana growers in states like California. You could put this under the “respect for science” category since the use of Marijuana as medicine is thoroughly established. But Bush, beholden to his right wing base (It seems that they only believe in “states rights” when it suits them.) couldn’t see his way to allow medicinal Marijuana to ease the suffering of sick people.

We’ve been suffocated by the outgassing of Bush for so long that it’s hard to remember what the fresh air we’re experiencing in the Obama Administration was like.