http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/bushs-legacy-of-failure_b_922
59.html
March 19, 2008
Bush's Legacy of Failure
By Robert Scheer
That idiotic "what me worry?" look just never leaves the man's visage.
Once again there was our president, presiding over disasters in part
of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that
suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and existing
reality.
Be it in his announcement that Iraq was being secured on a day when
bombs ripped through that sad land
or posed between his treasury secretary and the Federal Reserve
chairman to applaud the government's bailout of a failed bank,
George Bush was the only one inexplicably smiling.
Failure suits him.
It is a stance he learned well while presiding over one failed Texas
business deal after another,
and it served him splendidly as he claimed the title of president of
the United States after losing the popular, and maybe even the
electoral, vote.
It carried him through the most ignominious chapter of U.S. foreign
policy, from the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to an
unprecedented presidential defense of torture.
The totally unwarranted assurance was there this week as the once
proud dollar fell into the toilet and the debacle of Iraq and Bush's
other failed Mideast policies pushed oil prices to record highs.
The Europeans, who didn't sup****t the U.S. imperial intervention, are
doing much better, not having to pay for guarding besieged oil
pipelines while U.S. taxpayers are saddled with trillions in future
debt,
not to mention 4,000 U.S. military deaths and 30,000 U.S. injuries in
a war the administration had promised would be paid for with Iraqi oil
revenues.
Even in Baghdad last week there wasn't enough oil to keep the lights
on for more than a few hours.
But the president is happy because his legacy issue, the war on
terror, is intact.
No matter that this week the Pentagon was forced to release a re****t
conducted over the last five years that concluded, after surveying
600,000 official Iraqi documents captured by U.S. forces, that there
is "no smoking gun" establi****ng any connection between Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaida.
The re****t was so embarrassing that we taxpayers who paid for it were
not going to be told of its existence, even though the explosive
conclusions were totally declassified, until ABC News forced its
posting online.
The network re****ted that the Pentagon had canceled plans to issue a
press release or make it available by e-mail or otherwise online
because, as one Pentagon official put it, the study is "too
politically sensitive."
Damn right it is--
Bush squandered U.S. treasure and lives in an effort that had nothing
to do with the infamous attack on America.
As for the real war on terror against the real al-Qaida, those folks
are very much on the rebound, just where they were before the 9/11
attack, building their bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, Wall Street is crumbling,
not because of planes cra****ng into buildings but because the
outrageous knaves of finance, freed from the most minimal requirements
of public accountability, have been permitted to destroy America's
reputation in the world for financial probity.
In the name of ending what were claimed to be onerous regulations
imposed after the Great Depression, this administration accelerated a
bipartisan pattern of allowing Wall Street to betray investors with
impunity while abandoning the federal government's obligation, once
accepted equally by conservatives and liberals, to ensure our national
solvency.
This tendency, under way for decades to give the bankers what they
wanted--codified in the Financial Services Modernization Act, which
was signed into law by Bill Clinton and which permitted banks, stock
brokers and insurance companies to merge--was exacerbated by Bush's
appointment of rapacious cor****ate foxes to watch the cor****ate
henhouse.
They will take care of their own,
which is why Bush was smiling,
happily posed in that photo op between Henry Paulson Jr. and Ben
Bernanke announcing the Bear Stearns bailout,
made possible only by the federal government using your tax dollars to
pick up the bad debt of the banks.
Tape that picture to your wall to remind you,
when you open a credit card bill with a 30 percent interest rate--not
the 2 percent the Fed will charge banks--
or see the increase in your adjustable rate mortgage,
of just what your government will do for the really big guys that it
will never do for regular folks.
In the years to come, as millions lose their retirement income and
homes,
we will have occasion to remember Georgie ****gie, who kissed the
taxpayers and made them cry before he ran away.
_______________________________________________
Harry
--
when you believe the only tool you have is a hammer.
problems tend to look like nails.
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