Analysis
By Kent Manthie – Jan 9, 2010
When making an announcement that he won’t be running for governor of New York (like we really need or want the likes of him), “former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani…claim[ed] that this nation “had no domestic attacks” under President George W. Bush.”*
And you wonder why this idiot isn’t planning on running for governor. Maybe he ought to go take a class in recent American history first, so to get his stories correct. Giuliani is the third such crass Republican that has made a similar misstatement for no other reason than to attack President Obama and his administration, which is doing a much better job than the Bushies did. As far as I can tell, Obama hasn’t lied to America about the wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least Obama is doing his best to mitigate a terrible situation he inherited from former President Bush and his henchmen Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith and Richard Perle, to name a few of the hawks that were salivating at the prospect of invading Iraq at least two or three years before the “terrorist” attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and the plane that putatively was en route to another terrorist attack destination but was forced down in a deserted field in Shanksville, PA.
After these terrorist attacks that DID happen under Bush’s watch – eight months into his “selection” as president by the majority conservative (Republican-appointed) Supreme Court (Bush wasn’t elected by the popular vote, he lost by over 500,000 votes and because of the Republican controlled state of Florida with their purposely confusing “butterfly” ballots which caused 1000s of votes to be thrown out due to “overvotes” or “non-votes” – meaning that there were those infamous “hanging chads” still stuck to the ballots, which, even though it was obvious who was voted for, got tossed out anyway and if Gore had just won one of several close calls in states, the whole Florida debacle wouldn’t have mattered because Gore would’ve won the popular and electoral votes handily). But I digress, like I said, after those attacks that did occur on Bush’s watch and occurred even after many warnings and indications that something “really big” was about to happen – like, say, airplanes being used as missiles, targeting buildings in big cities, in order to create chaos and interfere with the economic system and martyrs out of a bunch of losers that were brainwashed by people who didn’t care about life, but worshipped a cult of death that wasn’t Islam at all, after Bush’s DCI, George Tenet missed boatloads of intelligence that practically screamed “we’re going to be under attack in a short time” as well as many other “classified briefings”, etc and the attacks happened anyway, Bush’s first action was to send armed forces over to Afghanistan, where these al-Qaeda training camps had been operating with impunity for years and bomb the hell out of them and then to take out the evil, theocratic, 12th Century living Taliban, all the while searching every nook and cave for Osama bin Laden, now public enemy #1, but never finding him or even his number two, the bespectacled doctor, how ironic – one who is trained to save lives now planning mass murders, the whole Afghanistan adventure seemed to be going well – the Taliban had been run out of the government, we installed our own puppet government, led by a former employee of UNOCAL, Hamid Karzai, who now, we know, is as corrupt as a Louisiana politician. But what we (the US government, that is) needed to do was to stick around awhile to make sure that the hard-core Taliban supporters were dead and gone and, like cockroaches, didn’t suddenly make a comeback (as they have done in recent months and years). Instead, once he and Dick Cheney had the chance, even over Colin Powell’s – then Secretary of State – objections – that is, until he went before the UN assembly and made a complete ass of himself in defending his boss’s warped logic of reasoning why Iraq ought to be invaded, Bush took many troops away from Afghanistan, troops that would’ve been useful there then and that might have prevented us from needing another 40,000 or so more troops today and Bush called up many more armed forces -even National Guardsmen and all the reservists to fight the most lopsided war of choice in history – the most unnecessary war in history – all to avenge his daddy’s besmirching by not finishing off Saddam in 1991 and because of his warped mind and his DCI’s bad intelligence that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction” which he did not have. Sure, he didn’t go out of his way to be helpful to weapons inspectors and show he did not, but that was just a bluff, a way to puff up his chest towards Israel – who do have lots of nukes as well as we do too. In fact, years after the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner over the USS Lincoln with Bush in a flight outfit, it was revealed that, indeed, Saddam did not have any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. It was true that he was working on some type of nuke program, but basically as a deterrent against Israel, who had most of their nukes aimed right at Baghdad and as militaristic as Israel are, wouldn’t be afraid to take Iraq out.
So with all this mixed up intelligence, wrong information and a hastily put together and badly thought out plan to rid the world, finally, of this “evil dictator” who is a “threat to all Middle East nations’ security”, etc. Bush, even though 99% of the rest of the world didn’t agree that he was a threat and did not support the Bushies war plan at all. In fact the Bush administration made much enmity between the US and European countries like France, Germany, Russia and bullied the rest – weaker states like Italy, Czech Republic and Spain, to go along with his warped reality. And of course, the UK, especially Tony Blair, being the US’s lapdog in all things to do with foreign policy, went along with every step that Bush made without questioning a single thing about these wild, untrue claims. Blair may not have made even a squeak about this wrongheadedness, but the citizens of England sure did and that is why in the middle of Tony Blair’s 3rd term in office, quietly resigned and moved on to some UN post or other to make way for a guy with a tiny bit more of a backbone, Gordon Brown, even though all through the Iraq debacle Gordo was Chancellor of the exchequer; he sat right by Blair in the House of Commons during their weekly (weakly) “questions for the prime minister” at which members of the House of Commons would be able to directly question the PM about whatever matters were on their minds, be it of international importance (usually doggedly pursued by the leader of the Conservative party, the main opposition party, but don’t forget there’s also the Liberal Party and the Free Scottish Party as well, who don’t get equal footing with the opposing Tories).
So what I’m saying here is that Obama has done nothing “wrong” – he didn’t get us into this mess – do you finally understand that now, Dana “Empty Head” Perino, former propaganda minister for Bush (aka Press Secretary) and Mary Matalin, big-mouthed Republican nobody.
On Jan 21, Barack Obama took over as President of the US and as such he inherited a financial disaster that was the fault of greedy Republicans and Republican-backers on Wall Street who took advantage of many not-so-bright former renters who desperately wanted to own a home and who listened to all the propaganda about how easy it’d now be to get mortgages even if you had little or no credit and soon it seemed that non-traditional lenders (meaning non-banks) like Countrywide, just to name the most egregious of them all, were soaking these poor folks for everything they had and then something happened – the housing bubble burst – it was a bubble stupid, of course it was going to burst! And with that bursting of the bubble, thousands, if not millions of homes became “underwater” overnight – meaning that the loans they originally took out for whatever steep price their house was selling for – say it was a million dollars – had just lost half of its value and now it’s worth $500,000 but the borrower is still stuck paying off the million dollars borrowed to pay for the original price. What happened next? Foreclosure after foreclosure and because it had suddenly become quite attractive for hedge funds and other shady investment firms to bundle up a bunch of subprime mortgages into a security that was sold on the open market – basically a bet that all these loans in these bundles would get paid back – with interest – with no problem – but guess what? They didn’t and soon bankruptcies were flying out the door, people suddenly realized that they’d be fools to keep on paying a loan on something that was only worth a fraction of that loan so a lot of them just left the house keys in the mailbox and said – screw it – keep the damn house! Other, more desperate people tried like hell to keep paying their mortgages but in the end the banks won out and gleefully kicked all these families to the curb and kept the houses – houses that you can now go to auctions and buy for maybe 50-60 cents on the dollar. Banks don’t want to have a bunch of inventory of houses – they’re not real estate companies, for chrissakes, their banks!
That was all Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke’s doing, along with the heads of Goldman Sachs and some other creeps. All Bush appointees. Bernanke’s lucky – he was appointed to another term by the Senate. But good ol’ Ben did have some good qualities. While we did have this terrible financial mess, Ben kept interest rates down at a very low rate for a long time, waiting out the crisis and keeping inflation at bay. So he does deserve some credit there. Plus he’s a smart guy, a scholar who specialized in studying the great Depression. But Hank Paulson – he was a sneaky guy, a former insider – the CEO of Goldman Sachs before Bush tapped him to be his third Treasury Secretary.
I could go on and on about all the derivatives and the credit default swaps and the bailout of AIG and the automakers coming to the table, hats in hand asking for more money, as well (which they got – except for Ford, which smartly, did not want the government dictating who could run its own company and taking any kind of stake – and now look at how well Ford is doing vis a vis GM and Chrysler), but I’ll just leave it there and say that Obama had a lot of awful stuff on his plate when he entered office: the wars, the financial debacles and a lot of money troubles that each party blamed the other for (hint – it was the Republicans’ fault and that party should go the way of the Whig party back in the 1800s. We need a real liberal party to counteract what is becoming a very centrist, if not almost right of center Democratic Party. That would bring in real change and even if a “Liberal” party didn’t win, it would force the Democrats to rethink what it is they stand for and for whom they are doing their bidding.
Well, let’s hope this year is better than last – with Bush gone it can’t get any worse, that’s for sure! -KM