Come January 20, 2008, liberals will have to shop for someone new to blame for their economic woes, natural disasters, and hangnails. Since his inauguration in 2001, it seems George W. Bush has become become the perfect scapegoat for liberals and "independents" alike. President Bush may not have been perfect. His public speaking leaves much to be desired. But, the explanation for every problem over the past eight years is not George Bush.Bush was handed two of the most difficult terms in recent history. Within nine months of his inauguration, he was forced to deal with September 11th, an attack that was years, not months, in the making. While still tangling with Islam extremists, Hurricane Katrina devastated the southern coast of the United States. While shock waves from Katrina started to dispel, the economy began to deteriorate. More recently, the mortgage crisis reared its ugly head. Never mind that Congress went Democrat in 2006 and has a lower approval rating than the president.
Uncharted territory presented itself over and over again during the Bush Administration. Like every administration, his was not without error, but liberals may be surprised when a money tree doesn't sprout up in their backyard come January 20th. Soon enough they may be faced with the truth that one man is neither responsible nor capable of destroying the United States all by himself.
15 comments:
Unless that one man behind the curtain was Dick Cheney.
You are right; far too many people blame Bush when he wasn’t smart enough to cause all that trouble on his own (just imagine all the brains in a Bush/Palin ticket!). It was really his VP that ran the show. One has to ponder if it was Bush trying to finish what his father didn’t. Or was it really Cheney looking for a way to line Halliburton’s pockets even more, a new evil to replace the cold war, some sort of quick victory to improve morale after 9/11 or was it really just because of the oil? I think we can all agree that it is Cheney that owns most of that list. In fact, Cheney was the one secret service hustled to a hidden bunker while Bush listened to stories in a classroom for nearly 30 minutes after being informed of the World Trade Center situation.
Move past the machine that runs the Republican Party and you see the rest of the corrupt politicians, feeding off the money and power showered on them via the lobbyists, Republicans and Democrats alike. They, in turn, are obviously funded by big business because that’s who pays their salaries and expense accounts and gives them the dirty money they toss around to all the politicians.
So in the end it is really big business that runs the show and big business that got us into the mess. Sure, the big three automakers did their share of poor management but their pyramid scheme would have continued if not for the credit crunch and failure of the banking system, all fueled by the shady mortgage lending of companies like Quicken and Countrywide.
It ends where it began: big business. And that means Cheney, the puppet master, great and powerful Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
Neither Sarah Palin nor George Bush is stupid. You may disagree with their policies, but that doesn't constitute stupidity.
Unless you were in the White House, you couldn't possibly know that Cheney runs the show.
Albeit, he's been a liability for the Bush Admin., but anything beyond that is a theory.
We can agree that big business runs the show. People put far too much stock in the abilities of one man. The U.S. is just one large business and the behavior of people like you and me is far more important than the behavior of George Bush. If we all held ourselves accountable, we could achieve great success.
Didn't mean to say Bush and Palin are stupid, just that they aren't that smart. Big difference. The sad thing is that it's too late for Bush and Palin will never catch up even if she crams for the exam. She is a much better servant for the people in her current role; anything more would invoke the Peter Principle.
It's far too obvious that Cheney runs the show. Bush is there because of daddy and big oil wile Dick is there for Haliburton and all his croneys. Big Business. "I - am the Great Oz!"
A Failure of leadership.
The Constitution assigns the president two roles: chief executive of the federal government and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. As chief executive, he enforces laws, treaties, and court rulings; develops federal policies; prepares the national budget; and appoints federal officials.
I think we can agree that our world would be a disaster without the protections afforded to us by the various law enforcement organizations such as the FBI; they enforce laws developed by our government to ensure public safety. Other organizations such as the SEC enforce laws regarding stocks and bonds. The FDA enforces laws governing the medical community.
Regulation prevents corruption. The American people rely on our federal, state and local government to provide adequate oversight of the various systems that need to work together. President Bush’ leadership failed the American people, most notably when it came to the housing and mortgage crisis, by failing to develop federal policies and appointing federal officials to police the policies.
Bush’ mismanagement of the principals of The Ownership Society created an environment that encouraged lenders to promote shaky loans. We are also being led astray due to the current tax system that rewards home ownership at the expense of a true capitalist system by offering tax incentive for mortgage interest. Were it not for this tax break many people might prefer to rent rather than own their homes. A sensible tax system that is fair to everyone based on their income alone and doesn’t reward owning a home so heavily would provide a more balanced capitalistic system.
Bush is also far too liberal with spending. When he assumed his duties as president there was no federal budget deficit. His misguided policies to supposedly counter terrorism by invading Iraq contributed significantly to the current deficit. Moreover, his failure to manage the housing and financial systems is only adding to the fiscal crisis and lackluster economy.
And finally, by driving the fear of terrorism (which is exactly what the terrorists want us to do – be afraid and change the way we live our lives) Bush has been able to slowly remove our civil liberties through the use of the Patriot act. And that is a very sad fact when you consider that many of the state flags flown during the Revolutionary War carried the phrase “Give me liberty of give me death.” These liberties are being siphoned off every day. Simple math predicts what will be left when all our liberties are gone.
I am shocked that no one has written a rebutal to the previous post. Unless there is nothing to rebute!
“We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.” — President Bush, Oct. 15, 2002
From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.
He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.
As early as 2006, top advisers to Mr. Bush dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn; as recently as February, for example, Mr. Bush was still calling it a “rough patch.”
The result was a series of piecemeal policy prescriptions that lagged behind the escalating crisis.
“There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,” said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush’s former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. “Had we, we would have attacked them.”
“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”
For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security. The housing market was a bright spot: ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.
Lawrence B. Lindsay, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals.
“No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsay said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”
Everything in this interview says "according to sources" (not named). I'm not saying she wasn't prepared. She wasn't prepared. You're 100% correct, but...
The "Africa" and "NAFTA" business is hearsay.
PS Fox News is not invincible and they are "fair and balanced" after all :-) They had to put a liberal in there to get all sides.
Are you saying that Fox's chief political correspondant is a liberal? Seriously???
By the way, I think you meant to respond to the Palin post.
“This week President Bush hosted the annual White House Hanukkah party. Yeah, there was an awkward moment when Bush made a wish and blew out all eight candles.” -Conan O’Brien
“President Bush is hosting a lunch next month with President-elect Obama and all the former presidents. Isn’t that cool? Yeah. Bush said, ‘I invited all 43 guys, but only four responded.’ He doesn’t know what happened.” -Conan O’Brien
"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum," - Lawrence Wilkerson on the protectorate of Dick Cheney.
"Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation's honor be restored without full disclosure," - Dawn Johnsen, the new head of OLC.
12 Jan 2009 03:18 pm
A Confession Of Sorts
Bush today:
"Do you remember what it was like right after September the 11th around here? People were saying, 'How come they didn't see it, how come they didn't connect the dots?' Do you remember what the environment was like in Washington? I do. When people were hauled up in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, how come you didn't know this, that, or the other? And then we start putting policy in place -- legal policy in place to connect the dots, and all of a sudden people were saying, 'How come you're connecting the dots?' "
Translation: we were so frightened of another 9/11 and we had so little idea of what was out there that I decided to torture anyone we captured and ordered my flunkies to write memos saying it was legal.
Abu Ghraib was a "huge disappointment" because it revealed exactly what they had authorized: Gestapo and Communist Chinese torture techniques that were never originally designed to get intelligence, but to provide false confessions to buttress police states. We do not yet know how much damage Bush and Cheney did to reliable intelligence-gathering; but we do know that even after Abu Ghraib, Bush and Cheney insisted on maintaining Abu Ghraib methods, and insisted they could be used on American citizens in the US if need be.
I'll turn the lights out soon and be out of your hair.
As chief executive, the president enforces laws, treaties, and court rulings; develops federal policies; prepares the national budget; and appoints federal officials.
All of the following happened on Bush's watch. Bush failed on half of his job description.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Harry Markopolos, a former financial executive who tried to blow the whistle on Bernard Madoff, told Congress that securities regulators had ignored his repeated pleas for a thorough investigation of the accused swindler's alleged $50 billion fraud.
The failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to detect the massive scandal was examined at a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. The panel is gathering information before it launches a broad reform of financial regulations.
Markopolos told the House hearing that "the SEC is ... captive to the industry it regulates and is afraid" to bring big cases against prominent individuals.
He said the agency "roars like a lion and bites like a flea."
At the hearing, Markopolos described his probe of Madoff and attempts to share information with SEC officials. As early as May 2000, Markopolos said, he provided the SEC's Boston office with evidence that he said should have triggered an agency investigation of Madoff.
Over the subsequent nine years, Markopolos said he resubmitted the evidence to the agency, but to no avail.
"Because nothing was done, I became fearful for the safety of my family until the SEC finally acknowledged, after Madoff had been arrested, that it had received credible evidence of Madoff's Ponzi scheme several years earlier," Markopolos said in his written testimony.
Markopolos had harsh words for some SEC employees, such as Meaghan Cheung, the agency's New York branch chief whom he had contacted in November 2007. Cheung, Markopolos said, never grasped the concepts in his report or asked him any questions.
"Her arrogance was highly unprofessional, given my understanding of her responsibility and mandate," Markopolos told the Congressional panel, which held the hearing as it considers broad financial regulatory reforms.
Post a Comment