Merry Merry

The Way it Is

Memorable quotes from the first week of the great Bush/Cheney rewrite:

"While there's room for an honest and healthy debate about the decisions I made — and there's plenty of debate — there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe," Bush said.

"I was aware of the programme, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," he [Cheney] said.

"And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

Look, whether it is over the decision to go to war on what turned out to be a bevy of lies, the decision to inflame the hatred of a billion Muslims and turn the entire international community against us, or the explicit approval of the use of illegal and immoral torture against captured prisoners, it is important that you realize that Bush and Cheney simply do not give a shit what you think. Just get over it.

Just go.

Two short clips from the first few exit interviews with Bush perfectly illustrate just how amazingly unreflective and obtuse he is in the face of the destruction he has brought to this country, our reputation, the economy, and the lives of millions of Americans and Iraqis.

First, he comes to the conclusion that he has "abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market"



Unlike Alan Greenspan, who finally came to the conclusion that his Randian belief in a self regulating free market was an absurd and childish notion, Bush simply does not understand that his free market fundamentalism hasn't been abandoned, it has failed.

Next, he farts out his true thoughts on the disaster in Iraq. In the face of all of the information that has come forward over time, the misguided decisions made that dragged us to the place we find ourselves today, the flawed intelligence, the outright lies and the human tragedy that he has unleashed, his response is a chilling, "so what?"



Socrates said that the unreflective life was not worth living. Apparently that message didn't resonate with the cheer leading squad at Yale.

and another thing....

...that I learned from Joe Scarborough this morning:

It is very suspicious that the sitting Democratic State Senator in Illinois would support the election campaign of the Democratic candidate for Governor in 2002.

Truisms

Some things I learned from watching CNBC today

1. The auto industry is in trouble and the bailout failed because the auto workers get paid too much and wouldn't budge on negotiations regarding future wage concessions.Their problems have nothing to do with the fact that GM sells less cars than Honda but has 10x more dealerships. Furthermore, the fact that the Republicans in the Senate think it's a good idea to forcibly legislate the wages of working Americans is in tune with their belief in a free market economy.

2. The SEC failed miserably in the last decade not because they have been starved as an organization by successive Republican administrations, but because they've lacked a strong leader.

3. Nancy Pelosi is really to blame for the fact that the Treasury has poured a trillion dollars into banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms. She said that the Democratic Congress would be more frugal than the Republican one.

4. Larry Kudlow thinks that Mitt Romney should be the car czar because his father ran AMC, and he used to live in Detroit.

5. Nobody in Detroit has even lost their job, like on Wall Street. It's been like a big party out there.

6. Sen's Corker, Shelby and McConnell did a great job because they were tasked with brokering a settlement. The fact that they failed at this should not in any way get in the way of Corker being named by MNBC as a new "star". Their failure also has nothing to do with the fact that they each represent states with large non-union plants for Toyota, Mercedes, Nissan and BMW.

Meanwhile, read Joseph Stiglitz' article in Vanity Fair if you'd really like to understand how we reached this point. I'll be wrestling my neighbor for a dead squirrel in the street.

Universal Health Care, Round II

Thomas Frank lets the cat out of the bag in today's WSJ...

He points out that the GOPs visceral reaction to any proposed plan to provide universal health care is based upon two bedrock beliefs, one of which they have proven to be quite willing to cave on, namely big government spending. Conventional wisdom tells us that the GOP opposes universal health care because they can't stomach the idea of big government programs and favor the magic of the free market. This is a bit tough to swallow considering the debacle we are wading through at the moment.

The other, more critical opposition comes from a much deeper place, however. As Frank points out

Still, conservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.

"The plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that this memo is "the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics" because it opens up a fundamental conservative anxiety: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."

Frank's piece places this thought in the context of the Clinton administration's failure to realize that embracing a "liberal" approach to the issue would not only be popularly accepted, but could become a game changer for the Democratic party, but perhaps that was another time and place. At this point, it is irrefutable that the country resoundingly supports a comprehensive universal health care plan, and that the GOP understands the existential threat that such a plan may represent.

Deep thought of the day

Am I the only one that thinks it odd that Goldman and Morgan Stanley are issuing government-backed debt?

Whoa.

This, by the way, is not a parody.

ziggy

Don't forget that at one time, David Bowie ruled the pop music world like few others ever have.

Michael Lewis on the end of Wall Street

Great read.

Blowback on the Treasury..

We are really in uncharted waters in terms of reacting to the conflagration that is running through our economy and the markets, and the great fear is that opinions will swing wildly one way or t'other. Digby, who's writing I enjoy, has been at the far end of the reaction to the bailout efforts of the Treasury, basically getting the pitchforks out and lighting the torches.

I think at this point, stripping Henry Paulson of his authority to spend more cash, with Ben Bernanke thrown in for good measure, isn't an option but a duty. And Chuck Grassley's call for the newly minted oversight board to investigate conflicts of interest among all the Goldman Sachs execs serving as the ladlers of corporate cash during the bailout is absolutely warranted. However, this oversight is coming at the END of the process, not the beginning. With four trillion already passed out, it's not like putting the brakes on the giveaways is going to make much of a difference today. This is not to say we shouldn't be investigating and scrutinizing what amounts to theft, as well as building a new regulatory structure for the future (yes, listen to Eliot Spitzer on this one - setting aside his personal life he's probably the most knowledgeable person in America about what needs to be done).

I don't share the abject fear of the Goldman-led cabal that is wildly flailing about, throwing our money at the problem in any and every way that they can come up with. But I do understand the suspicion, the cynicism, and the outrage that Digby shows. In my estimation, the systemic problem facing us, the painful de-leveraging of the economy itself, is truly unprecedented, and like the 1930s requires creative and disruptive ideas and approaches. Those are by nature unsettling and scary.

What I do fault Paulson and the Treasury on is their incredible tin ear as it pertains to the process. His immediate response, in which he said: "give me the 700 billion and don't ask any questions" was an obvious non-starter in a politicized environment. His refusal to move quickly away from the flawed idea of repurchasing troubled assets from the banks rather than investing directly into the institutions themselves looked bad as well. But the appointment of Neil Kashkari really sealed his doom, I think. He could have picked from any number of smart and competent candidates to head up the TARP program, and in fact, Kashkari may be the smartest and most competent candidate. But he is 35 and he's from Goldman, and that wasn't going to play in DC.

Paulson lame ducked himself, and the fallout is ugly. He gave his opponents all the ammunition that they needed to paint him as a Wall Street guy taking care of his Wall Street buddies. He's exiting, stage left, but can't do it soon enough.

Tom Friedman Recants

Wow. The confessionals keep rolling in. Here's the column that we all wish that Tom Friedman would actually write. It's fun to imagine, though:

But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself.

The importance of Sarah P

Andrew Sullivan, former editor in chief of the New Republic, who literally destroyed his reputation as he went into the tank for Bush and the rush to war in Iraq in 2003, has seen the scales fall from his eyes over the past five years and admirably called out the McCain campaign for the travesty that it was. He reaches his boiling point in this post where he explains why the nomination of Sarah Palin continues to be a shocking and important thing.

The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve. That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling. 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural "identity". Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again. And we have to find a way to prevent this from recurring.

There is a bit more piling on that follows, but the post is worth a read. I truly never thought that we as a nation could be more insulted by a candidate than we were by W, but I'll admit that Caribou Barbie took it to a new level. And Sullivan makes a good point, in that we need to understand why this could happen and in particular why a near majority of our electorate would support such a potential President. It is disturbing indeed.

Fast Forward..

Man, I know that we just finished a grueling death march, but with the prohibitive favorites for the Republican nomination lining up, I almost want to fast forward to 2011, when the recession will presumably be over and the race for the White House will resume.

I mean, c'mon, really?

Holy Joe

Here's as far as I would reach across the aisle if I were President Elect Obama....







Chuck Hagel for SecState, bitches...

by the way, as soon as the Senate races are settled, Holy Joe should be stripped of his committee chair and relegated to the back benches of the Senate. They won't forbid him from caucusing, but they darn well should.

John McCain Will Win

Alabama.

Worst campaign ever.

A generation of voters will never consider the Republican Party because these idiots listened to Karl Rove and Bill Kristol and stirred up this ridiculous culture war. They fell back on their old canards because they couldn't find anything better or more relevant to talk about. They will be rightly drubbed, and the collateral damage will be great.

Good riddance to the lot of them.






UPDATE: An enlightened commenter at Townhall.com gives his opinion on unfounded reports of a Republican election official being removed from a polling station in Philadelphia:

Bring it on
Start the rioting. I know my neighbors and we are ready for battle. We have seen this before. Every time blacks don't get their way, they riot, killing innocent people and burning down businesses. It's never that I lost this time, and I will try even harder next time to succeed. It's the evil white man. The bright side is they always burn down their own neighborhoods, knowing full well that a 12-gage is waiting for them elsewhere.

What it's all about.

Daughter of slave votes for Obama
109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail.

By Joshunda Sanders
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 27, 2008

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Republican-leaning Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

It's Friday.

Deep Thoughts on the Economy

You knew this was coming, that it wouldn't be long before the right pointed out that the broad destruction of wealth caused by the global economic meltdown happened at a very interesting moment...

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn't the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people's number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won't be the first time.

AHA! It's a conspiracy of the lefties.

And we'll know the real story just as soon as the election is over and B Hussein Obama is safely ensconced on Pennsylvania avenue, I suppose?

My guess is that if Obama gets elected, the true facts of the economy will come out. Suddenly, our economic outlook will look much brighter after November 5th. In the coming months and years after the election, we will be told how Obama has managed this crisis and overcome it

Indeed.

On another note, a proposal that I helped Bill Hambrecht put together was highlighted at Joe Nocera's blog yesterday. We've actually put together four white papers on the recent financial meltdown, they can be accessed here.

Seeing through the now

One thing that worries me a bit about the inevitable rout of McCain and the ascendancy of an Obama administration (aside from the enormous task that faces that administration) is the propensity of our press and pundits to quickly spin the "meaning" of the election and explain the results in real time. This focus on interpreting the results of great public exercise of an election tends to run to the near term and skews towards the ahistoric.

On November 5th, when we wake up after having elected this nations first black President in a landslide, the recriminations will run deep and the punditocracy will look for the usual suspects. My hunch is that the deepening and rolling economic crisis will be indicated as a key reason why the McCain candidacy failed, and in some ways it is one. Further, the absurdity of McCain, his inept and lurching strategy, his muddled and plainly contradictory messages and his bizarre and frankly irresponsible choice of Caribou Barbie as his running mate will also be cited.

But those are all derivative. What cannot be ignored and cannot be forgotten is that the election of Obama and the rejection of McCain is part of a larger statement made by the Republic. It is a repudiation of the failures of George Bush, a complete rejection of the man, his character, his words, his actions and his smug entitled philosophy of governance. If the economic troubles that the Second Bush Recession are the near term causes of our discontent, let us not forget that these troubles are his failure. The "MBA President" proved to be as incompetent and unsympathetic as Richard Fuld at Lehman, or Kenny Lay at Enron. When he speaks of the crisis he is unconvincing and seems blissfully unaware of the nuances, inevitably glossing over the differences between liquidity and insolvency, proving over and over again that he has not matured from his days as the failed CEO of Harken Energy. The aggressive effort to leave the credit default markets as unregulated and opaque as possible, led by Phil Gramm has much to do with where we find ourselves today, and it is an attitude towards regulation that springs directly from this President's head. The disdain for institutional oversight and the petulant disgust for our system of checks and balances pervades Bush's worldview, is something so grand even exists.

His foreign policy has been flatly rejected by all but a desperate few dead-enders, who lust for Arab blood and flatly consider "the other" a threat to our white, heterosexual, male-dominated protestant culture. The blatant fear-mongering and manipulation that this administration has wielded like a club on the American public has left the majority of the country weary, and as the slow moving disasters in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan grind on, the scales have fallen from the all but the most paranoid and angry jingoists.

For Bush's approach to government is in no way "conservative" and certainly not laissez faire. Thousands of signing statements directly undermining signed legislation is hardly "hands off", rather, it points to an aggrandized and obnoxious belief that the unitary executive should be unfettered, that the will of the people, expressed through our elected legislature is to be ignored, and that the wishes of a small group of privileged insiders should be paramount. This, and a cynical and opportunistic appeal to the inherent fear, racism and homophobia of a portion of our electorate has corroded and destroyed the Republican Party in America, and the inevitable result is McCain, an almost comical candidate that carries their standard today.

The complete failure of the Bush presidency cannot be forgotten, and cannot be ignored. There were too many people who were derided as unpatriotic and whose reputations were besmirched by this band of fools for stating the obvious, that this man is more than an incompetent buffoon, but rather a plague upon our country, a dangerously incurious vessel that happily acceded to the nefarious advice of a group of cynical, disdainful and ultimately wrongheaded advisors who brought shame and tragedy upon our heads.

This is why we have McCain and Palin, cartoon characters both. Don't let us forget that their failure is Bush's failure.