Impact of two terms of Bush’s management of the US Economy

The Bush Administration today issued a mind boggling record deficit projection of $482 billion for 2009. And that’s not even counting the off-budget estimated $80 billion being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the cost of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and homeowner bailout bill.

That’s a yearly deficit of over one-half trillion dollars, most of it borrowed from strategic competitors like China and Kuwait.

Skyrocketing energy costs are only beginning to ripple through the economy, showing up as higher prices in everything from food to tires to pharmaceuticals.

Home foreclosures are up a staggering 250% (in LA), unemployment is rising rapidly, and even successful businesses with great credit history can’t get a loan.

The entire financial system, ranging from Wall Street, investment houses, to regional banks is in a deep freeze driven by the fact that no one knows what anyone’s paper assets are worth. The economy is so bad that Bush has been forced to betray his conservative base by doing an about-face (legacy pun intended) on the aforementioned bailout. Ayn Rand must be rolling over in her capitalist grave.

Obviously, this is bad news for all Republicans running for office this year. Despite the tragedy of Iraq and the increasing threat of a reconstituted Al Qaeda and resurgent Taliban in Afganistan and Pakistan, we’re back to “It’s the economy, stupid” as the overriding political issue of the 2008 election. And it’s hitting the McSame Campaign like a Democratic mule kick to the gut.

McSame has admitted that the economy is not his strong suit, and that he’s trying to make up it for it by reading the book by the man who did as much as anyone to create the current crisis, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Kinda like asking a surgeon with a history of amputating the wrong limbs to take a little off the top.

McSame’s answer to the ruinous cost of energy— his flip-flop on off-shore drilling, is a classic case of bad timing, considering that oil billionaire (and Swift Boat funder) T-Boone Pickens is currently spending $58 million on an advertising campaign that states that we can’t drill our way out of the crisis.

Oh well, McSame can still run as Commander-in-Chief of the “surge.”

As for his snuggling buddy, George Junior, the latter can sleep easy knowing that once again he has bested his father, the previous deficit champ. By racking up the three largest deficits in US history, W. wins the gold, silver and bronze medals. Now it’s on to the Beijing Olympics, where he has volunteered to judge the synchronized waterboarding competition.

UPDATES

July 29 (Bloomberg) Merrill Lynch, the third-biggest U.S. securities firm, will sell $8.5 billion of stock and liquidate $30.6 billion of bonds at a fifth of their face value to shore up credit ratings imperiled by mortgage losses.

July 29 (Reuters ) Home Prices Fall in May, Erasing Four Years of Gains. ...S&P said the composite index of 10 metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in May, for a 16.9 percent year-over-year drop. Regions that saw some of the largest gains during the housing boom, such as Miami and Las Vegas, were the worst performing markets in May. Miami home prices fell 3.6 percent in May from April for a 28.3 percent annual drop. In Las Vegas, prices in May slumped 2.9 percent, for a 28.4 percent decline from a year earlier.

Last week in a speech before Israel’s parliament, The Knesset, George W. Bush implied that Barack Obama was a terraist appeaser for his willingness to talk to evil doers like Iran and Syria. His foreign policy clones, John McSame and his Svengali adviser, Joe LIEberman immediately piled on, citing Barack’s inexperience and naiveté.

One has to wonder how they feel now that its been revealed that Israel is actively pursuing a peace agreement with Syria. And with Hamas, via the government of Egypt.

Or that Qatar has negotiated a deal between the government of Lebanon and the terraist Hizbollah to end its takeover of Beirut, on terms quite favorable to Hizbollah.

How about the vital role the government of Iran had in brokering a cease fire with the Shi’ites in the two month old explosion of violence in Basra and Sadr City in Iraq?  Not to mention its previous help in dislodging the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Then there’s the fact that the Bush Administration has negotiated an end to the nuclear weapons programs in of Libya and that charter member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea. And continues negotiations with Iran to reduce the overall level of violence in Iraq. Can you spell hypocrisy?

What are the war mongers to do, now? Well, they can always attack Iran before the election, capitalizing on the historical reluctance of the American people to change war horses in mid stream. Seemed to work in the 2004 elections.

I mean, wouldn’t you want an PTSD crazed experienced war hero like McSame, who did his level best to bomb the Vietnamese into the Stone Age, in the role of Commander in Chief? As opposed to, say, a wimp like Obama who thinks the willingness to talk is a sign of strength and not weakness?

To accept the Obama approach to foreign policy is to reject the neocons‘ glorious vision of the New American Century. How can the USA realize her manifest destiny to dominate the world (and its diminishing natural resources) during this unique unipolar moment in history if we allow other countries to play anything more than a supporting role in remaking that world in our own triumphant image?

To accept an Obama presidency would be a rejection of Biblical prophecy, at very best a delay in the apocalypse and the rapture! Wasn’t the US founded in part to destroy Islam, as John McCain’s (now rejected) “spiritual guide” Rod Parsley maintains ?

I’ll leave it the 20th century bard, Bob Dylan, to describe the moral and diplomatic bankruptcy of the last 7 1/2 years of the McSame approach to international diplomacy:

There’s no success like failure
and. . . failure is no success at all.

Think You Want This Junk?

Cindy McCane with husband John Top Gun “Maverick” McCane

• Junk is battle-worn, seventy-two, cranky
• Contradicts own sworn testimony
• War with rest of world “just an unfortunate fact of life”
• Abortion: Nevah, nevah, nevah
  
• Believes in evolution
• Espouses Episcopalian and Southern Baptist Christianity

How About This?

Co-Commanders-in-Chief Clinton

• Junk is ambitious, sixty-one, double X, comes with Y chromosome baggage.
• “Change you can zerox” not working out
• Abortion: prochoice
• Believes in evolution
• Espouses Methodist Christianity
  

Or This?

Commander-in-Chief OBOMBA with the Mrs.

• Junk is wooly hot, forty-seven, charismatic
• Lacks killer’s instinct
• Abortion: prochoice
  
• Believes in evolution
• Espouses the United Church of Christ Christianity
  

I couldn’t sleep last night. Thank you for asking, it was the usual morbid realization about John McCain. From a strictly comedic gold mine point of view, McCain is the Mother pantload, and comedians everywhere were in danger of losing the kind of career-making material that only congeals once in a political lifetime. But then, I thought that it was “Bedtime for Ronzo,” too.

Lobbyist Vicki Iseman

The MSM is all a quiver tonight, not over another example of possible Republicult moral hypocrisy of the earth orbit-changing variety, no, not at all. Rather is it atwitter over the possibility that a corporate lobbyist who looks a little like Meg Ryan, Cindy McCain, and BarbiMac all dressed up to. . . plead her case— you know— make an emotional appeal— that her “client” genuinely needs Senator McCaim’s (sic) hot, throbbing passion for serving the American People fired up, and narrowed down, to the interests of. . . her client.

Well, hold on to yourself below the waist, because The Strange Sounds Express Is Fired UP and Ready to go! . . .it’s Really Rocking! . . . Back and Forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

But, like any political animal who dares to use phrases like “Moral Monsters” in front of national telewision cameras, his trajectory is far far out of any mere mortal’s hands. Well, accept for— you know.

George Bush.

Dub with concubine, John McCain

Yes, that’s right; George Bush. John McCain has been having a very public relationship with him for at least eight years, and they’ve never really tried to hide it except for that ugly illegitimate baby slur way back when; that was a rough time for both of them. But did anyone care? Where was the outrage? Where was the moral indignation, the kind that, just you wait and see, is about to start flowing like an eruption of some kind. Which reminds me.
Lobbyists have done a lot of unsavory things in the past three decades, but one thing is pretty much taken for granted by the political animals who ply their straight-talking Winnebagos of Washington down the moral avenues of power: if they can get close enough to a presidential candidate to, say, reach out and touch one, they are eventually going to unzip your fly.

And speaking of flies. As the MSM keeps a sharp eye out for any that are hovering in groups over the “Hillary Clinton Camp Pain,” the potential Commander-in-Chief’s plucky nickname for her mobile-mission Solutions Business headquarters, proving to all who support our over-extended battle weary troops until they have done their duty, that she is ready to be brutally and repeatedly attacked by the Republican red meat makers on day one. And every friggin’ day thereafter. She can take it, remember?