As I begin to write this, CNN.com has a big red banner across their home page. It reads: "Breaking News: AP: President Bush's top economic adviser says economic growth may be negative for the current quarter."
No sh*t, Sherlock.
And now George Bush is on TV, talking about how the government anticipated this downturn and got on it early.
Breaking news, George: Out here in the real world, it looks like you're seven years too late. People's economic growth has been negative since you and your crony capitalist crowd rode into power with the help of legions of Florida-bound lawyers aboard Enron planes and a Supreme Court decision so tortured it makes waterboarding look legal.
Out here, the only thing the government got on early is the control lever for of the Smoke, Excuse and Promise Machine. The economy may be sputtering, but the Smoke, Excuse Promise Machine is going full-tilt.
For years now, Bush and his buddies have been spoon-feeding the stenographers in the mainstream media a meme.
"The economy is strong."
And for the most part the mainstream stenographers have turned around and fed the meme to a country where working men and women could see it was crap.
Their wages were stagnant -- and still are. Their healthcare coverage costs were going up -- and still are. Gasoline went from $1.50 to $3 a gallon -- and is still going up. College tuition is still going up, too
Good manufacturing jobs have disappeared. When Obama talks about companies unbolting machinery and shipping it to China, that's not hyperbole. That's real life out here.
Instead of one good job, many working people have two crappy jobs now. And many of George W/ Bush's followers think that's just fine.
"I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota," said Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) recently. "We're the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs."
She was speaking in support of a proposal to stimulate the economy by Representtive. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the Chief Deputy Republican Whip in the House. Cantor's legislation was called the "Middle Class Job Protection Act." It suggests helping the middle class by reducing the corporate tax rate by 28 percent.
Bush and his flunkies -- including vast legions of well-off, vapid mainstream media types and pundits -- have spent two presidential terms fiddling while the American middle class burned.
They've tweaked the economy as if it were a tired V-8 in the old man's four-door Impala. In spite of all their ministrations, in spite of their tax breaks and rate cuts and borrowing money from China for rebates to stimulate more empty and frivolous consumer spending, in spite of every other form of bullshit they try, it's sputtering and dieseling.
It's not running right. It won't ever run right -- until somebody strips it down and rebuild it from the bottom up.
That somebody won't be the inept, rich, privileged-from-birth George W. Bush and his set. And it for damned sure doesn't look like a job for flyboy John McCain either.