"This is an emergency, there is a clear and present threat to our nation, everything could blow apart into a million pieces tomorrow, we must act now now now or there will be hell to pay, there is no time to bicker and argue about details like ‘who’s responsible for this’ or ‘how are we going to pay for this,’ the federal government must be immediately granted sweeping new supreme powers without oversight, and anyone who disagrees with me or questions me or seeks to modify my decisions is a traitor, and I know best because I am the president."
Hmmmm…where have I heard this before?
Oh yeah, now I remember. Yeah, it’s all coming back to me now.
Amazingly — amazingly — Bush seems to be doing it again. A president with less credibility than a turnip, the man responsible (along with anti-regulator John McCain, of course) for this entire mess, is now telling us that we’re in the midst of a crisis and only he knows how to solve it and we have no option but to agree with him or else we’re destroying the country. The amazing part is that Washington isn’t just laughing in his face and looking for someone actually qualified to handle the situation, they’re actually taking his proposal seriously and worried about their political future if they don’t unquestioningly obey our Dear Leader.
As Atrios puts it, "Any member of Congress who looks at the plan to give Hank unchecked power to transfer $700 billion from the Treasury to his friends’ companies and has any reaction other than ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me’ does not deserve to hold office."
His proposal, as far I can tell, is: it is not enough that the middle class pay for the highest deficit in our history and a three-trillion dollar war nobody wanted, it must now also help keep the ultra-wealthy Wall Street crowd from losing its yachts. This is, I hope (but can by no means be sure) the final insult to the American people by not just the worst president in history, but one of the worst Americans (which, as The Stranger in The Big Lebowski would put it, "which would put him high in the runnin’ for worst world-wide") in history.
But he’s a brilliantly successful pirate, Todd and this is just one more maneuver before they scuttle the ship.
I think deep-down, Pres. Bush is an Anti-Federalist in the Jefferson mold. Imagine an unintelligent nihilistic Jefferson (yes, he’d own slaves if he could) with a lot of very wealthy “friends.” Above all, he wanted a weak central government, but when he took office the Federal government was powerful, dominating all the little state and city governments.
Initially, the idea was to seize control of the executive branch in the same way pirates commandeer a ship. They would take it over, strip it of its wealth (dividing it among those “friends”), then leave it adrift after four years and go on their merry way.
I’m sure you noticed the same pattern when appointing cabinet secretaries. Bush appointed to run federal agencies men and women who wanted those agencies to go away: Ashcroft at Justice, Norton at the Interior, Bolton as UN ambassador.
The atrocities of Sept. 11 presented him with the opportunity to go far beyond the initial plan. That’s why he fired up the war machine immediately and outsourced every single ancillary function to the KBR-Halliburton consortium in no-bid contracts.
It’s the greatest act of outright piracy in world history. Pres. Bush (or his bosses, if you prefer to think that way) boarded the ship, ran it onto a reef, offloaded the cargo and is now prepared to scrap it and sell off the parts before retiring on the gratitude of the firms that have profited from his eight years as Pirate King.
So what you’re saying is that Bush took International Talk Like a Pirate Day a little too seriously.
Now, now… I don’t think Palin’s church would be too happy if Bush were tied to His Noodley Appendage in any way.
Sir, I request that you bring me Cakes and Ale. (Failing that, an analysis of Big Trouble in Little China.)
Are you saying my blog feels like a final exam?
did he actually say that? i didn’t see that quote in the nyt article. do you have a link to it somewhere?
Um, no. That’s me paraphrasing, although much of my paraphrase can be found in yesterday’s speech here.
Below is a quote from todays NYtimes, so at least the media is starting to tie McCain and his deregulatory ideology on our horrible financial meltdown.
For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.
Apparently, the US administration came hat in hand to the German administration and demanded that we help out.
At least according to what I just read on Yahoo News.
The German administration refused, saying that the mess is the Americans’ fault, and they have to fix it themselves without making the taxpayers of other countries pay for it as well. They also said that telling the banks, “Hey, so what if you screwed up, here’s a couple of billion to help you out” is sending the wrong message.
Mostly, I think the German government (even though I agree with them this once, if the report is true) is just pissed off at the several billion of Euro this is already costing us all.