Hold on, let me get this straight: Bush gave the keys to the castle to a marauding bunch of plunderers by gutting every regulatory commission known to man and stuffing them with industry reps from the organizations they were regulating, spent the country's cash on extravagantly expensive no-bid contractors in money-pit war zones of his creation and deficit financed 2-trillion dollar tax cuts (passed on reconciliation) that by and large went to the rich and NOW we learn that the oil spill basically occurred because after he had finished hobbling the SEC so the banks could go willy-nilly on America, he also cut loose the likes of BP to drill at will, without proper permitting or inspections?!
And after all this, the country seems ready for the Republicans again? How quickly we forget when the Hope narrative looses its contrast point, namely, Bush cronyism. A) yes, I blame Bush and the Republicans that controlled Congress but B) I blame Obama for being a-historical. Obama came in with 'forgive and forget.' Forgive, maybe. Forget, hell no! We've had no torture "Truth and Reconciliation Commissions", no investigations into no-bid contracts, and now we learn about the enabling of off-shore drilling without a proper audit of the mess left by the petrotocracy that came before. These are huge mistakes. Yes, the country needed healing, but first cut out the cancer. First air out the wound.
Now here we are 18 months after the election and the American people are mad as hell about budget deficits and entitlement spending. Well, could the Administration please remind us what the country would have looked like had the credit markets frozen, 2 of 3 US automakers gone under and government spending NOT been used as stimulus to make up for the fact that consumers stopped spending around the time that gas prices skyrocketed, incomes declined and they started getting laid off, losing their homes and having yard sales to make ends meet? I mean, come on, this narrative is real. The other narrative about how government spending is ruining the country is fiction. Without government spending, we'd all be talking about how it used to be: what Cadillacs used to look like cruising down the boulevard, what the boulevard once looked like with bustling stores and how American success once felt.
Now we have a fighting chance of recovering our economy - it's adding jobs at a pace not seen in 4 years, and it's been growing for 3 quarters in a row. This is PROGRESS. And we may yet help stave off economic collapse in Europe, so our exports can continue to recover too. That means MORE AMERICAN jobs. We can't cut and run. That's what the all-of-a-sudden fiscally conservative, formerly "tax cut and spend" Republicans want. Well, here's the news: if we cut and run -- pull back government spending too soon - the economy could tank again. Yes, let's get the fiscal house in order -- as Clinton did, but first let's get revenues going with a growing economy.
So as the election approaches -- the deficit grows, but so too does the economy. The Gulf oil gushes, but a climate/green jobs bill in the Senate points the way forward. I hear the President is fuming. Me too. Why should we have to clean up their mess(es) and then lose an election for it? That makes no sense.