political train wreck

Bubbya got you into Aghanistan, then set that war on the back burner in favour of the nonsensical invasion of Irak.

It isn't surprising that Obama is having a hard time getting out from under the mistakes of the previous administration - Dubbya and his crew were amazingly ignorant, and amazingly confident that what they though they knew was correct.

Reminds me of someone who posts here regularly...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Announcing an attack (but that you'll leave in a year) means you lose.

Train wrecks aplenty these days, i.e. O's economic team. Larry Summers, Peter Orzag, Romer--they're all bailing.

Holtz-Eagan [*](CBO director) explained in the Wall Street Journal that the CBO is not responsible for all those CBO reports that O touts as supporting O. (The CBO just crunches, O-bots provide the assumptions.)

He sounded tired of being used. He quit, too.

Cheers, James Arthur

Wrong, as usual. W and crew were at least organized professionals. O and clowns are clumsy amateurs who, like nearly all leftists, don't understand how the world works. O seems to have some serious personality defects, too.

With a bit of luck and popular wisdom, we'll have conservatives running Congress, with the White House to soon follow. The Dem's economic damage will have to play itself out.

John

Summers will probably be replaced by someone worse. Try to imagine that.

This has some good lines:

John

It's like a bunch of children, squabbling on the playground. None of them seem to have our country's best interests at heart.

Why am I not surprised?

Ed

As Alexis de Tocqueville famously never said,

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

John

So what's it to be then? Troops out or staying around for the next few decades?

Ironically, Iraq is hopeful, as a sustainable sort-of-democracy in that part of the world. Afghanistan, whose invasion was popular post

O, like LBJ in Viet Nam, doesn't know what to do.

John

Iraq is just waiting for the last US troops to leave before concluding their civil war.

True of every invader of Afghanistan. after a while.

Perhaps organised, but fatally ill-informed about the political realities of Iraki society. And their justification for invading Irak was that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, which meant that they hadn't listened to what their intelligence service had been telling them.

They got themselves elected, which isn't bad going for clumsy amateur clowns. The Republicans put up Sarah Palin as vice-president, which had its own comic aspects.

Obama and his team may not understand how the world works in the same term as Dubbya and his clowns - which is to say they don't wear the same kind if blinkers that Dubbya and his clowns favoured - but they do seem to be doing a better job than Dubbya's lot.

Honesty and clear thinking are un-expected in a politican, but probably don't count as personality defects outside if the Republican Party (where they'd make the candidate idiosyncratic and inflexible).

The Dem's economic damage? The US banking system threw the world into recession on Dubbya's watch. Obama hasn't made the same mistakes as Hoover and has thus avoided a replay of the Great Depression of the early 1930's, which means that economic conservatives are worried about the budget deficit, when they wouldn't be worried by 25% unemployment and deflation - more fool them (and you).

James Arthur does argue that everything that went wrong with the banking system was the fault of the Democrats, but James Arthur believes that bankers and Republicans can do no wrong and concots his specious arguments to fit his inflexible preconceptions

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

While the Republican Party is in the business of transfering the public's money into the pockets of the military-industrial complex, who - in turn - subsidise the election campaigns of Republicans who are known to be sound on defence. The US now spends as much on "defence" as the combined expenditures of the next ten countries down the pecking order. Historically, spending as much as the next two has seemed adequate.

It's a pity that so little of that money has gone on weapons that are effective in the battles you are now fighting in Afghanistan and Irak.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

While the Republican Party is in the business of transfering the public's money into the pockets of the military-industrial complex, who - in turn - subsidise the election campaigns of Republicans who are known to be sound on defence. The US now spends as much on "defence" as the combined expenditures of the next ten countries down the pecking order. Historically, spending as much as the next two has seemed adequate.

It's a pity that so little of that money has gone on weapons that are effective in the battles you are now fighting in Afghanistan and Irak.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

What would you know about jobs? You haven't had one in years.

Clinton signed the bank deregulation law that started the boulder rolling down the hill. Barney Frank and pals made sure the damage was maximized. It just took a while to get going.

John

Sure. And the Republicans blocked moves to scructinise the banks making the loans. It's all very well to say that seeds of the problem were sown by Clinton's legislation, ten years before the disaster became obvious, but the problem had only developed to point where it might have been dealt with on Dubbya's watch, and he didn't do a thing.

And Clinton's legislation was only one of the mechanisms that made it possible for banks to make irresponsible loans to people who couldn't pay them back, then sell on the debts to people whod didn't realise that the they were buying mortgages that weren't goimng to be paid off. James Arthur argues that the bansk were "forced" to make criminally irresponsible loans by the existence of the Clinton legislation, but unbridled greed isn't usually accepted as a justification for criminal behaviour.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

He apparently understood the danger better than 95% or so of economists.

John

B. Hussein O. got elected by a landslide of Africans and Mexicans who simply voted color.

Now, even _they_ are figuring out, "Oops! Maybe he _isn't_ the Black Messiah after all!"

Thanks, Rich

So your saying that there are more " Africans and Mexicans" then whites in the USA ??

Or are you saying that the whites are not voting any more ??

Maybe

Nah, just that nobody wanted to vote McCain/Palin. Kinda the way the Dems threw the '06 election to Dubya by running Kerry. ;-)

As far as more "A&M" than whites, I don't think so, but when that happens, will we, as a minority, be eligible for affirmative action and all the other preferential treatment that all the other minorities are getting?

Thanks, Rich

'04?

Of course not. Note that females have "minority status".