Thursday, November 11, 2010

Honest To Crap, I Was Only Kidding...


By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, November 10, 2010; 6:42 PM

I miss George W. Bush.

I don't miss him in the sense that I wish he were still president. If he were, we might be at war with Iran and North Korea by now, and perhaps Portugal. Neither do I miss the endless debates over waterboarding and the Iraq war - bad memories that have returned to the news as Bush has re-emerged into public view this week to launch his book.

Rather, I miss him because in the end he was willing to toss aside his ideological orthodoxy when the national interest required it - a trait conspicuously absent among his fellow conservatives these last two years.

It was the final chapter of Bush's presidency, and is correspondingly the final chapter of his memoir, "Decision Points." As Bush describes it, he had just been told by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that they should spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to buy up mortgage assets, and he approved the plan in full. "If we're really looking at another Great Depression," he recalls saying, "you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover."

By Tea Party doctrine, that's heresy. But Bush, in "Decision Points," doesn't back off at all from his defense of the auto industry rescue and the federal ownership of financial companies - even though those positions today would make him a pariah in his own party.

"The strategy was a breathtaking intervention in the free market," he writes of the TARP bank-bailout program. "It flew against all my instincts. But it was necessary to pull the country out of the panic. I decided that the only way to preserve the free market in the long run was to intervene in the short run."

In an extended book-launch interview with Bush, NBC anchor Matt Lauer referred to a Pew Research Center poll that found nearly half of Americans hold the false belief that TARP was passed under President Obama, while only 34 percent know it originated under Bush.

"Oh, yeah?" Bush replied. "Fifty percent of the people were wrong." He defended his rationale for supporting TARP: "Do you adhere to your philosophy and say, let them all fail? . . . Or do you take taxpayers' money and inject it into the system in hopes that you prevent a depression? And I chose the latter."
To quote a poster which has had some prominence in the Left-ward protuberances of the Book: Heh, heh. I fucked ya. Thanks for blaming the Negro..."

1 comment:

Cirze said...

Dana Milbank is so much shit.

(www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/07/ah-journalism/49555)

Every time I read his columns (which I don't really do anymore due to the heartburn) I can't help remembering that he's the perfect poster child for the rightwingnut paid-off subversive journalists.

Bush is parroting (or worse - knowingly lying outright (which was my thought at the time)) what he was told by Paulson (Goldman Sachs' multimillionaire CEO who made millions more off the subprime scheme) in order to payoff the AIG insurance (and much, much more) with taxpayer funds which then enabled Goldman Sachs to emerge from their obvious (to almost anyone now) finely-tuned financial chicanery and not only keep their bonuses, but make even more the next year - and subvert all the new financial reform that should have resulted from their planned nightmare for the taxpayer.

"Because no one could have known" - Hankie Paulson

No one should be paying these liars any attention.

Other than with a rail and tar and feathers.

And ultimately jail time.

And the return of all the stolen money.

But these are just my thoughts, of course.

S