But bailed-out George, who never met a failure Daddy or Daddy's friends didn't rescue him from, didn't have any trouble accusing Dems of being big spenders. This is from the most profligate spender in US history, the one who inherited a surplus, bankrupted us into the next two generations, and is actively trying to spend and destroy the Social Security surplus, so he can dump seniors into "onyourownership."
Bush's many failures as Texas governor included him having to run back to Texas the summer before the 2000 election in order to patch a half-billion dollar hole in the state budget, all because of his poor management. And yet this was so underreported, he now gets to play similar havoc with the nation's fiscal resources.
The only question I have is why are not his fellow Republicans joining in holding him accountable? Our national treasure is not to be wasted on elective, disastrous adventures of Dick and George. They are for our infrastructure and human services. We have had the best military in the world for decades. And yet nearly every aspect of the nation's budget masks what is largely "defense" spending. It's long past time to throw a few crumbs our way. That means health care, education, infrasturcture, environment protection, inspection of food supplies, social services, enforcement of consumer protections, and more.
As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life in any true sense. Under the cloud of a threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, from a speech before the American Association of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953."
We need to raise the salary of the President of the United States by about 20-fold, to attract a better pool of applicants.
He's totally uninterested in what's going on....yesterday's press conference on improving the FAA and air traffic was just a wonderful example of how they push something for him to read in front of the cameras and he, embarrassingly, stumbles through it, struggling with even completing a sentence.
Can you even imagine a Bush library?
Today's Examiner had a related article about how the White House puts earmarks in the budget, just like Congress does:
http://www.examiner....
I think when Bush was originally elected in 2000, the country was in good shape, had a huge budget surplus, had no "threats" like the old Soviet Union, and that the people who voted for him (I was not one) were looking to him to be more of a steward than a leader.
The reversal of fortune for the U.S. in just 7 years is stunning.
"Some portion of the damage done by the Bush administration could be rectified quickly. A large portion will take decades to fix-and that's assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden-even at 5 percent, that's an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated."
The current candidates are what they are; but we can't afford to have another bad hire in that position.
Thanks again for the quote. I'm saving that one.
I'm thinking of Charles Percy, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Thomas Brooks, and more.
Anyone who now doubts the qualifications of any of the Democratic presidential hopefuls need only look at the countenance of the current chimp-in-charge and reflect on what his job experience was when he ran in 2000,i.e., a litany of failure and bailouts.
Flawed though some Dem candidates may be(or seem),at the end of the day, if we control both Houses and the Presidency, we should rest assured that our rights and social benefits that were given to us by Roosevelt, Johnson, Truman, Humphrey, liberal Supreme Courts, will be preserved and probably expanded. We should run on the nature of our Party, on that Nature contrasted to the meanness and anti-social viciousness of the Republican PARTY; That should guide the campaigns, not a slipped question or poor soundbite.
As for accountability, only those with social consciences will feel the need for self recrimination and accountability, a feature lacking in the very nature of Republicanism as we know it today. That is why they stuck with Nixon almost to the very last despite all the evidence of his criminality, that is why they stick with Bush to the very end despite his thuggish pigheadedness (think SChIP, Rummy, etc.). And that is why the brand as traitors anyone who disagrees with their various causes, irregardless of their record, irregardless of their military service, and irregardless of their fights to uphold the Constitution.
If we can do as you've stated it so concisely, winning should always be possible!
As for Medicare, now that's another story that REALLY requres a complex solution because it involves, beside outright thievery, the ordering of unnecessary tests by doctors, the inordinate number of doctors' visits by patients, and so on. God only knows how they will resolve that.
As for Paul Krugman, what a shame that he doesn't speak as well as he writes. The is no place on contemporary TV for the thinker who must ponder whether an answer is precise enough that boobus Americanus won't get the wrong impression; Chris Matthews will immediatly jump in with an inanity to fill air time (and his ego) and thinkers like Krugman are cut off. We saw this last week on Hardball, a title that certainly is descriptive of Matthew's head.
If this seems like I have little regard for most, that is true. In our little world of RK (and other like sites) the readers of RK and those who don't read much but at least know where their bread is buttered (Oh!, those cliches) dominate, but this is our little world. Outside, as I saw last week while visiting a small (150,000 pop,) town in the South, the people have zilch for informational purposes. The only newspaper is just what A.J. Liebling some 50 years ago in The Press predicted it would be: 8 pages of trivia news and local ads for beautiful clothing for size 14 women. The TV is trash. They get their news and views from O'Reilly, Rush and Sean (a great American!). What can these people know when my neighbor up here in the educated Blue land didn't know even 1 of 9 candidates in a Presidential primary 6 years ago, or know who Paul O'Neill was? Or Paul Voelker. They work, they come home after a long drive, slump into a chair, and watch not Keith or Blitz Wolfer but reruns of shit.
And these are our voters. That's why there is no accountability. The news, for most, is a day event, hardly any lengthier. Sometimes I wonder how we stay where we are, but I fear in the long run, considering the state of everything here, we will NOT stay where we are, and this makes me pleased that I am old enough that I won't be around to see the demise of all that seemed decent.
Though I have been too discouraged even to blog for a time this fall, as you may have gathered, I regenerated my commitment and recharged my batteries. (Still haven't forgiven the Senate members who censured MoveOn.org and, by extension, me. But they didn't care then and they don't now.)
As we speak the cast of characters (plus a few more) you mention is trying to redraw the political lines (narrow the band of what is "acceptable" political thought). They are labeling people as the enemy. A couple of the radical wrong mouthpieces are using brown-shirt tactics to silence critics, even, sometimes showing up in person to intimidate them.
But what really gets me is voters who are so disengaged they believe anything they hear from people like that. And what gets me even more is the vast number of Democrats who still think there is a liberal media, who think you can trust everything on NPR or PBS (they still don't get that the Republicans took it over and dominated it years ago and still do). They don't question when the "experts" are from the AEI, Heritage, Manhattan Institute, Hooever Inst. They don't ask where the funding comes from for these groups. I just had two more Dems who are liberal and they believe the "liberal media" myth. OMG! Where do we start?
They don't question when Jim Lehrer hosts "experts" for the surge who outnumber their counterparts opposed by 5 to 1. It's really disgusting. And it goes largely unnoticed.
The hardest battle we face is just getting people to question what they hear on TV. And media watch is what I'll be spending a lot of time on for the rest of my life. Talk about discouraging! However, if we can stay ahead of the anti-net-neutrality folks, we might have a pretty exhilarating ride.