During the greatest economic peril in a quarter-century, our MBA Preznit is absent without leave. Flailing helplessly as deregulation’s chickens come home to roost, George W. Bush may possibly be consulted pro forma by his economic policymakers -- but he is totally dismissed by the markets.
The week the Dow average closes a mere 50 points lower than it did Wednesday, September 17, 2008, will be the lowest it has closed since the week ending January 22, 2001. In other words, eight years of gains over the Bush preznitcy will have been wiped out. Gone. Sunk. As if they never had been. Talk about wasted time, wasted treasure and wasted opportunities!
But the pattern of Preznitial dereliction of duty was already long established before the market panicked. The Conservative in Chief and his henchmen provoked a more devastating US military defeat than Vietnam, shredded civil liberties more thoroughly than Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, spied more lavishly than J. Edgar Hoover, politicized the administration of justice worse than Richard Nixon, and connived at torture as no high official has done since Atty Gen Mitchell Palmer in WWI. The practical and constitutional sins of five separate administrations were compounded in the Bush cluster-failure.
The incompetent Bush preznitcy, like a stranded fish, rotted from the head downward. Now that the damage reaches the pocketbooks of Wall Street investors, Republicans finally begin to recoil in horror from what they have wrought. Failure to ensure the laws be faithfully executed, OK; but failure to prop up the price of stocks, unforgiveable.
The customary bleatings from the White House are muted; Bush knows he has no credibility. But it is disgusting that when the US actually needs some political leadership, there is none. There is no inspiring figure in office to say, and be believed, "We will get to the bottom of this crisis and resolve it." Instead we have the Federal Reserve and the Treasury becoming the de facto White House, the center of action and the wielder of power. In fact, to many in the market it is a genuine relief that Bush is not involved in any real way.
The 1929 crash started three years before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. We will not have to wait that long for President Barack Obama, but since events move faster now that is little consolation. If foreign investors fail to send more of their money to America to keep business functioning, the responsibility sits directly on George Bush’s tiny mind and inadequate shoulders. There are consequences for having reduced yourself to an international laughingstock, and Bush is enduring them – while we pay.
Many pointed out eight years ago that under Bush/Cheney/Rove we have a "regency," a period in government when a front man is said to rule while a behind-the-scene council of shady advisors and cronies do the actual work. Badly. The inherent ineffectuality of such figureheads was lamented in Ecclesiastes 10:6:
"Unhappy the land that has a boy for a king."
That was about 2,250 years ago. Them old folks knew a thing or two.
This is how naked America has been left. A fundamental source of our economic strength and world power, the investment markets, are in peril. Yet to deal with it we have only ramshackle and makeshift leadership, disregarded by two-thirds of his own people, rejected by the world as a whole -- and completely unfit to understand, much less remedy, the evils that are upon us.
It is as if the captain of the Titanic were senile. In place of a leader, we have a buffoon. This has been true for eight years, but all of a sudden it really matters in ways even Republicans can wholeheartedly regret. When they irresponsibly hired a lackadaisical pseudo-Texas straw man to run for them, they forgot to make sure nothing really bad would happen on his watch. Guess you can’t actually do that after all.
The foreclosed homes, lost jobs, shuttered businesses, and damaged families that are being multiplied by the stock market crash will trickle down throughout the economy with far more efficiency than Republican tax cuts for the rich ever do. We will pay sorely and long for the Republican hubris in hiring an incompetent. Bush’s economy is now at one with his war: an abject failure, an embarrassment, a human catastrophe, a policy doomed to fail, an abdication of American moral standing, an abandonment of world leadership. (And McCain-Palin are irrelevant because they offer nothing but the same again.)
When you fail the test of history and get a gentleman’s F, or go AWOL from your financial squadron, your family, fraternity and patrons can’t save you from the results. Now even Republicans grudgingly concede Bush’s failures. They blame Bush personally, not his ideology. So of course we can expect them to obstruct the necessary reforms. But even they can no longer ignore the manifold and serious mis- mal- and non-feasances of Preznit Bush. If only the rest of us could afford to.