(Author's unfortunately colorful language included)
From ginandtacos.com
"Bush and Ronald Reagan were very different people, with very different backgrounds and ideologies. It's easy to forget now that Bush was a born-again and Reagan barely even WENT to church. But their administrations served remarkably similar priorities, and this stems from their most important commonality: They were both absolutely STUNNINGLY incompetent executives.
Neither of them had any idea what their various appointees were doing, or even necessarily who they were. The picture that has emerged of the Bush administration since its merciful departure has been not one of calculated malevolence, but one of almost pitiable impotence. Bush and Reagan were both quite personable campaigners who couldn't administer a government if their life depended on it. The consequence of that is that when they took power, the people around them who actually knew the score had a very easy time doing pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted with no consequences whatsoever. Reagan had his Ollie North, Bush had his Donald Rumsfeld, and these guys are not exceptions. The Minerals Management Service was not a case of the foxes watching the henhouse; it was a case of NOBODY watching the henhouse and the foxes just walking right in and doing whatever they pleased.
You can certainly argue that Bush bears MORAL responsibility for what happened on his watch, but that doesn't really mean jack shit at this point. He had no idea what people were actually up to underneath him. They simply gave him some marginal decisions to make, he would Decide them, then kick back feeling good about himself while they kept doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Just look at the financial crisis. When the shitstorm hit in September of 08, if you listen to the people that were there, Bush had literally no idea AT ALL what was happening. Not only did he not expect it, he didn't even understand it. And when it came time for him to be The Decider, who was it presenting him with the decision? The former head of Goldman Sachs, a man that I guarantee you Bush did not personally select to be Treasury Secretary, but rather was a name selected for him by some Undersecretary of Buttfucking the Taxpayer, which he signed off on and gave a nice speech and then kicked back with a nice run and an evening of reflecting on how history will validate his Leadership. So Mr. Paulson shows him a plan to give tons of money to banks and Bush says OK, whatever you think, Mr. Smart Suit-Wearing Guy.
The point I really want to be stressing here is that at no point is one person in charge of all these terrible fucking decisions. It's a bunch of different people, all of them assholes, most of them on the take, doing whatever the fuck they please. There's nobody at the top, not even Cheney, and CERTAINLY not Bush. The second mistake is thinking that if Bush could get what he wanted, and Obama can't, then Barack Obama must either be a worse executive than Bush or he must be a secret conservative.
This is a well-worn tale: Bush got trillion-dollar tax cuts with only fifty votes in the Senate! He got the Patriot Act and gutted regulations, etc. He knew how to bring the hammer down to get what he wanted, and so if Obama can't get (the public option/financial reform/energy bill/whatever) passed, he must not actually want it.
This is a steaming crock of bullshit and it should be obvious why by now. At no point during his presidency did Bush ever get a single thing he wanted. The closest thing I can think of to an actual idea that started with Bush would be either No Child Left Behind or possibly the Mars program, and he actually got neither; neither was funded, neither has had any noticeable impact, both were basically DOA. Recently Bush claimed that he believed that oil should be phased out and wind energy is the wave of the future and, call me crazy, I think he's telling the truth. If so, then it should be pretty fucking obvious that W was not the one calling the shots in his administration.
No, what Bush got was what OTHER PEOPLE wanted. Massive tax cuts for the ridiculously wealthy were, I promise you, not Bush's intellectual baby. It was an idea that one of his advisors said would be a good thing, and a bunch of Congressmen agreed, and Bush signed off on it. Every major piece of legislation Bush signed was something he AGREED to, not something he specifically TRIED to get. In other words, the 8 years of Bush's presidency, that long national nightmare, was really nothing more than bland acquiescence to an murderous and insane status quo. I expect that the outcome would have been identical if there had been no President at all."...
..."Or, if you’re like me and you prefer the more likely explanation, Barack Obama is probably a fairly progressive person (if you pay attention to what actually comes out of his mouth, especially before he ran for president, this seems reasonably probable) and, more than anything, a highly talented executive who has managed to wrangle an mind-bogglingly huge bureaucracy, based on a frail and nearly-obsolete Constitution, chock-full of ideological opponents, massive egos, fabulously wealthy interests, and just plain antagonistic assholes and backwoods idiots, and managed to do more good with it in eighteen months than anyone in the past forty years. And on that point, the record is mercifully clear.
So next time you start to go on a tear about how Obama wants this, or Obama did that, or Obama is ignoring the netroots, or Obama is defending this or that Bush policy, please remember the sympathetic fallacy. The government is not a person, and Barack Obama is not your personal fucking Santa Claus."
In keeping with this line of thought just look below at what constitutes the best our vaunted political system can produce anymore to prevent the next "greatest downturn since the Great Depression". Rather than Financial Reform being the communist plot to take over our country that conservatives will breathlessly and endlessly repeat, welcome to the worst of both worlds.
Acquiescence to corporate-ownership of American Democracy with an Orwellian twist, mindlessly repeated by conservatives and dutifully reported in the mainstream media, of this communist plot to take over our country.
The Dodd-Frank bank reform bill: A deeply flawed success
"In a world where incremental progress is all but impossible to achieve, this is what a triumph looks like"
"Dodd-Frank is no Glass-Steagal, but the combination of the modified Volcker rule and the derivatives compromise do add up to a serious change in how Wall Street will be doing business. The Wall Street Journal opines that there is a "common thread: large financial companies are facing a tougher leash." Whether that leash is strong enough to prevent another mad dog rabies attack that infects the entire global economy is worth questioning. If it is true, as the New York Times quoted the president saying, "that the bill contained '90 percent of what I proposed when I started this fight,'" then Obama probably proposed far too little. Maybe it would have been better to push for twice as much and only get 75 percent of what he asked for.
But that's the narrative of our time. Achieving sweeping change, whether in healthcare, or bank reform, or energy, is effectively impossible, given the rules that govern the Senate and the fierce obstructionism of the Republican Party. Achieving anything at all in this context is still an astonishing victory."
And therein lies the rub, doesn't it? We are now at the point where our fate as a Democracy or Democratic Republic is determined in whole or in part by 100% of Republicans and a good measure of corporate sellout Wall Street and Blue Dog Democrats.
The forty-year conservative war on reason and fact is over and lost for the most part. The only force protecting the masses and our planet from the ravages of parasitic-rapacious-trickle-down economic royalist policies in an unholy alliance with authoritarian nationalists and misguided otherwise well-meaning religious folks, is horribly neutered.
The Government of The United States of America, governed by We The People, has been systematically and deliberately weakened and demonized night and day for forty plus years by those profiting the most from a weak ineffectual government.
It's a never ending source of frustration to hear from average citizens struggling to survive that things would be wonderful again if we would only cut taxes and social benefits and regulations more, after cutting taxes and social benefits and regulations for the last forty years; demonstrating a stupefyingly complete lack of understanding of what and who destroyed our economy for 90% of us and is destroying the Gulf of Mexico for generations.
At least half of us are utterly clueless and will believe anything, as embarrassing polls one after the other and Jay Leno's sidewalk interviews ably show.
The other half are broken up into fact-based realists (liberals) who ask why can't everyone see and understand what is happening right in front of our faces, and utopian authoritarians (most Republicans and Conservative Democrats) who are never deterred by the string of unmitigated disasters that have resulted from conservative "governance".
Welcome to America 2010, we're Number 37! But don't worry, after we finish off the unions and gays and liberals and "Big Government" things will get better.
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