Geroge W. Bush: The Worst President In United States History

The mainstream media is trying to stuff the administration of George W. Bush--The Worst President In United States History--down the memory hole. That eight years didn't happen, according to The Villagers, and less than one year of Barack Obama has brought us to the brink of economic ruin.

Don't let it happen! Challenge anyone who tries to blame the deficit on Obama. Remind them of the tax cut for the rich, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Medicare Drug "Benefit", and the TARP bailout. The war in Iraq accounts for $1.2 billion per month. That's BILLION. What is $1.2 billion times seventy-eight? The Medicare Scam cost us seven trillion, more-or-less. Now, they're telling us that every extra soldier we send into Afghanistan will cost us another million dollars. Since we've been there for eight years, extrapolate that million bucks per soldier up until today, And--don't forget--that the wars were "paid for" "off-the books."

Let's leave aside the exorbitant contracts awarded to Halliburton, Blackwater/Xe, KBR, etc. The above paragraph adds up to quite a bit of money.

The ONLY reason we're not in a declared depression right now is that the Obama stimulus package was sufficient to interpose a quarter or two of growth into what is an economic crash-dive. That's why The Villagers refer to our current plight as "The Great Recession." It's a dodge. Rest assured: This is the Second Great Depression. People don't have money. They don't have jobs. They don't have the security that most of us grew up taking for granted.

Put the blame where it lies... on George W. Bush: The Worst President In United States History.

A Cause For Concern...

Barack Obama hasn't been president for a year yet. The mess he inherited from the Bush Administration is rivaled only by the one existing during the transition between the presidencies of James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln.

BTW, every time I mention George W. Bush, I am going to emphasize his richly-earned title: The Worst President In The History Of The United States.

A number of issues that the Bush Administration has left for President Obama require a definitive departure from the status quo. This Time Magazine article is a troubling peek inside the Obama White House. It chronicles the firing of White House Counsel Greg Craig and why it happened. It doesn't give me a good feeling about the Obama White House. It doesn't give me a good feeling about the president's command of the situation.

So many issues facing our nation now require unambiguous leadership from the president. And President Obama has virtually disappeared from the field.

He should begin with his decision on Afghanistan and begin throwing his considerable weight behind some progressive initiatives like ending the two wars in the Middle East while capturing or killing the Al Qaeda operatives who authored 9/11; rendering quick, effective, and direct aid to the millions of Americans suffering under this undeclared depression; making definitive progress toward addressing energy policy and its relationship to climate change; and re-building the bond between the American government and its people. There are other issues--he need only read his campaign speeches--that demand his follow-through.

We've seen the conservative's work. It's a wonder they still get the lion's share of the appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows. It's a wonder they've remained out of jail. But they're still setting the agenda.

President Obama should give the Teabaggers something to scream about and do what the people who elected him sent him there to do: Effect change we can believe in.

A Message From Jacques...

Hello. My name is Jacques. I live with the idiot responsible for this sorry POS excuse for a blog. If he didn't slip me the occasional morsel of steak now and then, I don't know that I'd give him a second thought. I mean... SEVEN MONTHS worth of cobwebs?! He's been sitting at his other light box punching stuff in with his fingers, but he sure as hell hasn't been doing this.

Anyway, he seems to be taking an interest in the stuff he was doing all those months ago.

Fair warning: He may start blogging again. Just remember I'm the one who warned you when it's time to pass out the treats.

Woof...

Fox News Viewers Watch Specter Announce His Defection From Republican Party...

Requiem For A Heavyweight...

This is one of the first paragraphs of William F. Buckley's Wikipedia entry:

Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century", according to George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement. "For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure."
Buckley's primary intellectual achievement was to fuse traditional American political conservatism with laissez-faire and anti-communism, laying the groundwork for the modern American conservatism of U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan.

Bill Buckley died in February of 2008 at the age of 82 on the cusp of Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency of the United States. I would like to think that he died with his vision of America intact. I say that as someone who was not exactly included in that vision. He was adamantly against the civil rights movement. Buckley wrote the following in 1957 when I was not quite five years old:

”…The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

True to his intellectual rigor, his sense of fairness, and his essential decency, he repudiated this view.

Yet, he still held that view at a time when its effect was most crucial. Barry Goldwater came to repudiate it in later life as well. Conversely, Ronald Reagan put the shining happy face of neoconservatism on it. Reagan’s invocation of “The Welfare Queen” and George H. W. Bush’s demonizing of presidential rival Michael Dukakis via the dark-skinned boogey man of Willie Horton are of a piece. They diminished the nation’s political debate and laid the groundwork for the cynical, self-interested, pseudo-conservatism of Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, and Grover Norquist.

Again, I like to think that Bill Buckley saw through this hucksterism.

Now, the progeny of William F. Buckley’s movement are arguing for the acceptance of torture as a useful and indispensable tool in the fight against America’s enemies. I can’t pretend to think what Buckley might have thought about the present spectacle of American officials equating war crimes with mere trifles.

But I like to think that Mr. Buckley—his prodigious vocabulary shining at the fore—would have warned us against this abomination. I like to think that he would have been a voice of reason sounding the alarm against discarding the rule of law for the sake of political expediency. That is what Richard Cheney and those who assist him are doing now. They are trying to convince us that we have to break international law in order to save it.

Cheney. Rumsfeld, Rice, and the other Bush administration officials responsible for this country’s descent into torture as national policy should be held to account. It’s a view I hold partially because William F. Buckley laid forth an example that I follow. Our country is worth cherishing. Our country is worth consideration in national affairs. And the price we pay for that is that our country’s ideals are worth upholding.

Bill Buckley and I may have disagreed on the best way to do so, but we agreed.

On Sesame Street With Ricky Gervais and Elmo!

Things might seem dire in these trying economic times, but there's nothing like a good laugh to keep us sane. All the best to Ricky but especially to Elmo, who performed a work of genius under adverse conditions.

Headphones recommended.

Pietri Nella Mia Scarpa

President Barack Obama has done some great things in the first two months of his presidency. He has promised to end the commitment of combat troops in Iraq by a date certain. He has set in motion the process to close our shameful detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama has rendered George W. Bush's signing statements inoperative, rescinded the ban on federal funding for stem cell research, signed into law important legislation barring discrimination against women in the workplace, submitted an honest and forthright--though earmark-laden--budget, and passed a stimulus bill that will translate into real jobs and real progress for the American people.

But--alas--my unstinting support of him has come to an end. To paraphrase Don Altobello in The Godfather Part III, "I have some stones in my shoe."

The biggest one has been placed there by Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. His latest column--Behind The Curve--suggests very strongly and very convincingly that the current stimulus bill is inadequate. President Obama is surrounded by advisors who have been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and other key economic players in the administration had front-row seats for the making of the debacle that is our current economy.

They are still protecting their own interests.

The so-called "zombie banks" and financial institutions should be treated no differently than the seventeen regional banks that have been seized and liquidated this year. No more bailout money. No more bonuses gleaned from taxpayers. No more hemming and hawing about the value of "toxic" loans on the books of financial institutions.

Why?

The longer it goes on and the more bailout money allocated to the malefactors who got us into this mess in the first place, the less incentive average Americans have to honor their own commitments. Rick Santelli notwithstanding, what debtor should be counted as an idiot for walking away from an obligation when our own government is paying The Big Players to do that very thing? With bonuses! Why not?

"Why not stiff the banks for some tens of thousands of dollars when the government is pumping billions into those institutions for the same purpose? If they can default without penalty, why can't we?"

This is the psychology that adds to the toxicity of the current economic environment.

The second stone in my shoe? The Obama administration isn't even back on its heels as far as framing the issues: It's comatose. He's getting his ass kicked. Inaction is allowing incoherence to hold sway. The Mainstream Media are always going to give the right-wing a voice. That voice will always have influence as long as it is allowed to ring unchallenged. Witness the canard that--two months into his administration--Obama "owns" the economic mess we're in. The most intellectually benighted yokels in the furthest reaches of our nation's Dogpatches can be talked down from that lofty perch if only someone would undertake to do it.

No one in the Obama administration seems up to the task.

The final stone in my shoe? It can only be written down to timidity. Barack Obama is the premiere politician of this age and could be the premiere politician of any other if he would just take hold of the reins and drive this country into the proper direction. He needs to start "throwing elbows." He needs to stop lamenting his long-lost status as a private person and begin to take on this greatest of mantles.

Maybe Michelle can strap him into a chair in the White House theater and replay the pivotal moment from the movie The American President until The Clue Train pulls in.

It don't get no better than this, President Obama. You'll never have a better chance to crush these bastards than you have right now. Our future as a nation depends on you doing just that. Their leader is Rush Limbaugh and they're too afraid--to timid--to say any different. Offer those Republicans an alternative, Mr. Obama. Invite Paul Krugman and Howard Dean and Nouriel Roubini and FDIC chair Sheila Bair in for a meeting without Hillary's DLC flunkies around. Fashion a kick-ass policy that will lift this nation out of the crisis it's in, do so in a way that ensures that it won't happen again, and marginalize the Republican Party as an effective political entity in this nation.

Come on! They've proved that they deserve it! Pull the trigger and put us all out of their misery.

The Mad Bull Of The Pompous

Aloha! It's been a while...

I've finished my screenplay. Spring is almost here. The deafening peep of hungry chicks tended by their mother hens awakens me most mornings.

We have a president again. The mess left to Mr. Obama by the Bush administration is the most horrific since Herbert Hoover passed the torch to Franklin Roosevelt. The movement that began with the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and came to fruition during the presidency of Ronald Reagan has proved itself again.

Conservatism...

It's a word that still commands respect if it means what the late Bill Buckley meant. It's a word that means something good if it means what Theodore Roosevelt meant: Patriotism. Prudence with the taxpayer's money. Respect for the land, the law, and the legacy of American Democracy.

But that's not what we have now. The so-called "conservative" movement has done more damage to this country than any terrorist could have hoped to do. The Bush foreign policy has cost more lives--needlessly--than did the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11th, 2001. The conservative mantra against "tax and spend liberals" can't hold a candle to the damage done by "spend and don't tax" conservatism. Capitalists who have known that the cops weren't watching have stolen oceans of money, kept wages so low that working people now think little of using a credit card to buy a hamburger, and have the nerve to command the right to continue steering the ship that they've let run onto the rocks.

What do we have now? The Great Depression's Sequel.

What do we have now? Cries of "class warfare" from the right-wing bastards who made this bed in which we lie (""class warfare" being the outraged cry of an abusive husband finally shot by his wife).

What do we have now? Fear and uncertainty bordering on panic.

Our new president is taking steps to fix the situation. He has tried to enlist the assistance of every patriotic American in the task.

But what does Rush say? That "Obama should fail."

An American president should FAIL! Why?!

Rush Limbaugh is appealing to the dried-up promises of three decades. He's appealing to the intellectual bankruptcy of a movement that considers Alaska governor Sarah Palin a serious candidate for president. He's appealing to those who believe in the ravings of über-anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who identifies our government as "the problem" and prescribes no government at all for us--a government we can reduce to the size that can be "drowned in the bathtub." He is appealing to those too ignorant and too arrogant to face the cold, hard realitlies the rest of us face.

The government IS us! For good or ill, it is the expression of how much we care for ourselves and for others. The right-wing cries out against "socialism" after wrecking their country through sheer greed for the second time in the span of a century. Reality is literally forcing us toward a more equitable arrangement of our national affairs.

Good conservatives like Bill Buckley and Teddy Roosevelt might have questioned the path we travel toward restoration of American prosperity, but they would never have railed against setting out for the destination. The Republican Party--sixteen years removed from its effort to "destroy the Democrat Party as a viable political entity in this country"--stands at the brink of having done themselves in instead.

Payback's a bitch...