Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Possible reason for Wall Street crisis

More from Times' Business and Tech section, linked to from RCP:

How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street

And an interesting one from Politico:

Financial fight: GOP hits Bush on econ troubles

alcyone

Swaps are undertaken in order to balance risks and have nothing to do with increasing assets or increasing profits because it is a value-neutral operation. A swap is called a swap because the two "swappers" exchange securities or assets of similar or equal value. Essentially one company trades a short-term asset for a long-term asset while the other company trades a long-term asset for a short-term asset.

When you have short term liabilities and long-term assets, what happens if you have a sudden liquidation of the short term liabilities? You cannot easily sell off long-term assets to pay for them. So what banks do is to perform swaps with other companies in order to make their assets and liabilities similar in term. Some companies like Lehman and AIG are buyers of mortgages. Agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are buyers and sellers of mortgages.

Swaps have nothing to do with the government. Companies like AIG believed the mortgages sold to them by Fannie Mae were safe investments. Perhaps they didn't do their due diligence to find out if those loans were risky or perhaps they did but still believed they were safe. I'm not in the AIG conference rooms to find out their thought processes. In any case, they purchased many risky loans and paid the price when those loans defaulted.

When Clinton is to blame, I'll blame him. If not, I won't. For instance, I don't hold him in the least bit responsible for the dot com bust and the resulting economic problems. He had nothing to do with it. But we do have his fingers in the pie when it came to the Community Reinvestment Act and with his cronies running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Democrats hold a huge amount of blame in this financial mess but are getting a free pass in the press, as usual. McCain and Bush get no credit for trying to fix the problem (Democrats torpedoed the attempts to fix them led by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank), yet get all the blame for the mess now.

Meanwhile we have Obama sitting there as a Senator who failed to support McCain's bill, which would have placed additional oversight over FM/FM (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac), quite possibly uncovering the true extent of the pending disaster before it took down so many banks. And Obama has as his chief advisors three of the people directly involved in Fannie Mae's gross mismanagement. Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines were ex-CEO's of the failed company while Jamie Gorelick was the Vice-Chair of the board of directors. She pocketed $75 million while Raines pocketed $90-100 million (couldn't find out how much Johnson got) all while they were running Fannie Mae into the ground with fraud and Enron-style accounting and non-existent controls on the lending process.

It's quite interesting you posted that article about Richard Fuld taking hundreds of millions while destroying Lehman. Raines, Gorelick, and Johnson could be soul mates with Fuld as they did the same with Fannie Mae. And somehow Obama gets away with saying how he'll fix the problem when he failed to act when McCain warned his colleagues and while the architects of the problem are standing right next to him as he slams Bush for being culpable. It would be the height of irony if this financial mess somehow got Obama elected since people automatically blame the sitting president and his party regardless of actual culpability. I fear for the financial systems in the future with these people in charge because you know these three will get high profile jobs in any Obama administration. Raines would likely be Obama's pick for Treasury Secretary, as he was rumored to be John Kerry's choice for that position, so the fox would be in charge of the henhouse after the fox has already eaten most of the chickens.

I'm not getting into the whole who's connections are skeevier. I'm way too biased and way too scared of who McCain associates with.

Maybe because one decision to regulate does not counter a history of enthusiastic deregulation?

Besides, while gleefully underscoring Obama's do-nothing stance on the bill McCain proposed, it's all too easy to fail to note that in 2006 Obama did try his hand at legislature to curb some of this mess. Yes, it failed. *shrug* But so did McCain's, except, as I said, McCain has a long history of doing the opposite.

I'm just not quite sold on McCain the visionary yet. I hesitate even more when in 2007, he was saying he never saw it coming.

From where I'm standing, getting a "fundamental deregulator" to regulate would be the irony.

alcyone

ETA: Politifact looks at the McCain as visionary phenomenon.

Just for the record, Roger. Considering we have seen a lot of problems during Bush's two terms - the enormous accumulation of wealth among the richest Americans and the simultaneous shrinking earnings of middle- and low-income Americans, the housing bubble, the Wall Street crisis, the American budget deficit, the sinking of New Orleans, the slow rotting of American infrasturcture, the climate change with increasing drought in large parts of the United States, the growth of international terrorism, the geographical juxtaposition of Osama bin Laden and the bomb (both are to be found in America's ally, Pakistan), the diminishing status of the United states abroad - is there anything you blame Bush or any other important Republican for? Anything at all?

Ann

in 1996 Barack Obama couldn't get credentials to get into the DNC convention and had to take a taxi home because the car rental place wouldn't accept his credit card, yet somehow during Bush's presidency, Noobama accumulated enough wealth to become a viable politician and lawsuit his way into a senatorial office, ALL during Bush's administration despite a "crappy" economy. I TOTALLY blame Dubya for that.

Also, more illegal immigrants have come to the evil wicked polluting earth hating United States during Bush's terms than anytime in history, and that's because Bush is WAY too soft on illegals. I REALLY blame him for that.

Still I guess I can give credit to George for keeping Gore and Kerry out of office...oh wait...that was *my* fault, heh, I didn't vote for those guys.


TEEEEEEEJ

Who does he associate with that you're scared of?

Meanwhile you have no problems that Obama is tied to the Chicago Mayor Daley political machine (oh wait, there's no corruption there!). You have no concerns that he associates with so many people who hate America, including William Ayers the domestic terrorist who wishes he had set off more bombs. And there's Tony Rezko, the Annenberg Challenge, ACORN, plus the people I mentioned earlier who have fleeced Fannie Mae of hundreds of millions of dollars to line their pockets while sticking the taxpayer with a $200-300 billion bill. The list goes on with many shady people, yet you're scared of McCain's associates? The only shady ones McCain has ever associated with are the other 99 Senators in the US Senate. I will agree with you that I'm scared of them, too.

I would reply with a defense if this wasn't a page right out of the conservative smear machine. Also if factcheck/politifact/etc hadn't debunked all these numerous times.

And more importantly, who am I to intervene when you're having so much fun talking to yourself?



alcyone

Hmm, where to start. You incorrectly make the assumption that I think George W. Bush is flawless and is guilty of doing nothing wrong just because I don't criticize him every five minutes. As with Bill Clinton, i will praise him when he's right and I will criticize him when he's wrong. I defend him mostly because no one else will to any significant degree.

Well, here's a start to that list... and it's a long one.

* He started off his administration very poorly by trying to make friends with Ted Kennedy. That gesture led to Kennedy essentially writing the "No Child Left Behind Act" that has so many flaws it's ridiculous. The only thing that would have given teeth to the bill would have been school choice and merit pay for teachers and those were left out of the final bill. Never trust a Kennedy!

* Another poor start to his administration was the imposition of steel tariffs to help the steel industry against cheap imports. As a professed free market trader, he violated his own principles by imposing these. The tariffs eventually had to be removed as the WTO ruled against them.

* In the battle for Afghanistan, he gave far too much power to the lawyers who had to approve every single action taken there (and in Iraq, too, for that matter). The delay cost us our chance to kill Mullah Omar in 2001 when we had his convoy in our sights. A single Predator missile and he would have been taken out.

* He did not continue with his stated policy of a tax cut every year. While he had a good tax cut in 2001 that got us out of the dot com bust and had a decent capital gains tax cut in 2003, after that, nothing. While those tax cuts were taking effect, our economy improved considerably, millions of jobs were created, and the deficit fell in half. Conservatives take tax cuts very seriously and will remember that when election time comes when a Republican goes against his promises. Just look at 1992 and 2006 as examples where the Republican voters came out to fire their incumbents.

* When he did get tax cuts passed, he didn't push hard to make them permanent when they were first enacted. Instead he acquiesced to antiquated Senate rules which allowed sunset provisions to be put into the bill. So rather than having a permanent tax cut people could count on to still be there in the future, people and businesses had to hedge for the possibility that the tax cuts will expire and people will see an enormous tax increase. So now we have two presidential candidates running around claiming they're going to cut middle class taxes when all they'll really do is keep rates right where they are, assuming they even follow through on the promises, which I doubt. That's not a tax cut.

* With Republican control of Congress before our current oil prices started skyrocketing, he should have successfully lobbied for opening offshore drilling and ANWR years ago. Some Republicans resisted, but a deal should still have been done. Enough conservative Democrats signed on to make it bipartisan. Instead, Bush mentioned it for a while but never fought for it. We'd be better off today if that oil was producing now.

* He had a comprehensive energy policy that included new nuclear reactors, new electrical infrastructure for replacing our aging ones, additional refineries, and new drilling as well as huge spending on alternative energy. He barely tried to get it passed. If he had succeeded with Republicans in control of the White House and Capitol Hill, it should have been doable. We would be on our way to lessening foreign dependency on energy instead of stuck in the mud like we are now with oil still at exorbitant prices.

* Bush failed to defend the US dollar. When the dollar first started falling, the markets had the perception, probably correctly, that President Bush supported a weak dollar. So rather than using the Treasury Department to send signals to the market on US intentions to support the dollar even if only just with words, he did nothing and watched while the dollar tanked. Perception matters a lot in the markets. By acquiescing, Bush only served to make the dollar fall further and harder. Only recently when people finally figured out the US economy was stronger than the rest of the world and always has been did the dollar begin to appreciate again. While a weak dollar is good for exports, it didn't help in the long run with our current accounts deficit with oil rising to a high of $147/barrel for Light, Sweet Crude, more than offsetting our large export gains in other areas.

* He did not fire Donald Rumsfeld, General George Casey, and General John Abizaid soon enough. Those men were the architects of the minimum force necessary policy and stuck to it to the bitter end even though it was plain progress wasn't being made. Once he fired them and replaced them with Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, the war in Iraq started going our way, and in a hurry. Unfortunately, now it's too late and his popularity rating is still mired at 30%, making him an anchor on Republicans in 2008.

* Marine General Peter Pace and Admiral Mike Mullen were terrible choices for Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those men didn't have a clue how to win in Iraq and stood in the way of General Petraeus with petty requests for justification every time Petraeus sent in requisitions for men or materiel since they both opposed the Surge in Iraq, going against their Commander-in-Chief's strategy once the minimalist strategy was rejected. When the president had to finally go around those men by using retired General Jack Keane as a direct conduit between Petraeus and Bush, those men tried to curtail Keane's movements to cut off communications. Once Bush knew of their betrayal, he should have fired them immediately. Mullen is still Chairman, for some unknown reason.

* President Bush tried too hard to be unlike Lyndon Johnson, who was accused of being so involved in military decision-making that he jokingly said he had to give permission for every latrine that was dug in Vietnam. By being too deferential to his generals, he came close to losing Iraq. His generals, who had trained to fight the Soviet Union, hadn't a clue on how to fight an insurgency and win. He should have realized their strategy wasn't working much sooner and gone to a new plan.

* We should have asked Iraq to pay for part of our war effort. I understand Bush wanted to show that we weren't there for oil, but the Iraqis should have at least paid for part of the cost of the war. Instead, they've essentially paid nothing so far and get $75 billion a year in oil revenues. Even a quarter of that would have helped to offset some of the costs.

* He implicitly admitted that Guantanamo was a place of torture by saying that it should be shut down at first opportunity, playing into his enemies' hands. Every visitor to Guantanamo, including the Red Cross, has said that the prisoners there were better off than people in many of America's prisons. Basically Bush had no communications skills and was ineffective in fending off the torture charge. What he should have done was to make it a place for prisoners to fear. Instead, many prisoners gained weight and got better care than our own prison population.

* We should have killed al Sadr when we had the chance after four contractors were brutally killed and dragged through the streets of Fallujah. When the Mahdi Militia first raised its ugly head, we should have cut it off in Fallujah. Instead we sent in an Iraqi colonel who was actually sympathetic to al Sadr's cause. We should have gone in there with overwhelming force and killed him. If he wanted to be a martyr, by all means oblige him. Instead, al Sadr's been a pain in our side for years and has caused the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers.

* He appointed Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. While she was a decent lawyer, she wasn't Supreme Court material. Fortunately Republicans stopped the appointment and we got Samuel Alito, an excellent pick who doesn't legislate from the bench by making law out of whole cloth.

* He gave up way too easily on reforming Social Security and Medicare, the two time bombs that will detonate sometime within most of our lifetimes that will make Fannie Mae look like a school child who lost her lunch money instead of the $1.5 trillion it will eventually cost our economy. With the power of the presidency and the bully pulpit, he should have gone after that third rail of politics hard. Usually President Bush does what he thinks is best regardless of the cost to himself, but in this case he took the coward's way out. In this, I blame the entire Republican leadership for cowardice.

* We should have given Israel our IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes so that they could take out Iran's nuclear capabilities if they were confident of success. Instead, by depriving them of our IFF codes, Israel was unable to launch any attack since they would have been attacked by our own fighters.

* President Bush did an extremely poor job communicating what really happened during Hurricane Katrina, whether it be through surrogates or direct contacts with the media. He knew the media were unjustly painting him with blame for all the failures that happened, but he didn't have any idea how to get the word out about what really happened. Instead he let the media paint him as an incompetent, essentially killing the rest of his presidency. That was the moment President Bush became a true lame duck president. To make matters worse, he apologized for the failures of the federal government, making the media look like they were right.

* The president failed to communicate the discovery of WMD in Iraq. Regardless of whether they were small in number compared to what was expected (roughly 500 warheads discovered), he should have immediately made it public with an a press conference. Instead the administration buried it. When Senator Rick Santorum and Representative Pete Hoekstra asked the president's people why, they were told that the administration was tired of being beaten up by the media and didn't think they could win the media battle after already losing it the first time. Hello! Bully pulpit! The presidency!?!? Ronald Reagan never flinched at that kind of challenge. The Great Non-Communicator. Hmph.

* The president signed onto a horrible Democratic plan to give tax rebate checks to people with the economy beginning to go south. Clearly that didn't work as I had said it wouldn't. A demand-side solution never works. Even though he was a lame duck, he should have painted the Democrats as do-nothings and tried to get a good tax cut passed. A good tax cut goes a lot farther than a brief one-time only rebate check.

* The president agreed to sign a bill for a minimum wage increase to $6.55 in the midst of a declining economy. That will only serve to hurt the economy more and cost more jobs.

* He and the Republicans in Congress broke their promises to restrain spending. 2006 was the voters' revenge.

* When the New York Times spilled the beans about our secret program to track terrorist finances, Arthur Sulzberger and Bill Keller should have been thrown in jail immediately and been charged with treason. By not reacting to this treason, the rest of the media felt free to also spill our secrets, such as our wiretapping programs among others. Abraham Lincoln and FDR never hesitated to jail domestic enemies during wartime. Lincoln even expelled a sitting member of Congress, exiling Democratic Congressman Clement Vallandingham to Canada. There's a joke that goes around about how bin Laden has the cheapest intelligence service in the world that helps him find out what his enemies are doing. All he has to do is to go out and buy a copy of the New York Times for $1 a day. All previous presidents during a period of wartime imposed restrictions on the media except this president for unknown reasons.

* Worst of all of the above is a failure to communicate about Iraq in general. He was far too passive, letting his enemies define him rather than always taking the offensive against the media. Ronald Reagan knew that 90% of the media was against him. He didn't care. He went over their heads to the American people and explained things simply and with conviction. President Bush, instead, went into hiding as Democrats and the press started accusing him of lying about the justifications for war. With the power of the bully pulpit, he could have made mincemeat of the Democrats. Instead he let them paint him as a liar all in the spirit of bipartisanship. By trying to be bipartisan, he stayed silent while watching his enemies destroy him. When he finally decided to fight back, he was too late. His enemies had already successfully defined him. It didn't matter that commission after commission, such as the Robb-Silbermann Commission, the 9/11 Commission, the Butler Commission, etc. always found that no lies were told. When one side attacks and the other side doesn't respond, the attacker always wins.


Is that enough, Ann? I have more, but perhaps you see the point. Despite the problems I have with President Bush, he has one quality that makes him the ideal leader for this War on Terror. He wants to win and doesn't care what happens to him in order to win. Bush has been so successful in the War on Terror that people feel safe. Because they feel safe, other concerns go to the top of the public consciousness. People feel so safe that too many are willing to possibly elect the worst possible president we can have during a time of war, Barack Obama.

I think history will judge President Bush far differently than the electorate currently does. Outside the prism of partisan politics, historians, I believe, will one day look on his presidency as a landmark one, a presidency that laid the groundwork for victory against terrorists and for eventual peace in the Middle East. To support this, I will post a subsequent narrative comparing how another president fared with public opinion and how history sees him today. That may take a while, though, since it'll be rather long.

Perhaps because I don't think they've been debunked, despite what your links say? I already found a problem with one of your links with regards to the rebuttal of the Byron York article. They didn't bother to dig deeply into the meaning of "age appropriate." That could mean anything to anyone, but they didn't check closely.

So, who are the people McCain associates with that you're afraid of?

I see, Roger. Basically you blame Bush for not being right-wing enough. If I get you correctly, almost none of the problems that America is having today would have happened if Bush had been more decisively "radically conservative" (which is a contradiction in terms when you think of it). You will forgive me for doing a double-take when I read your statement that Iraq should be made to pay for your war in that country. Considering America was hardly invited there in the first place, that is a radical demand to say the least. Perhaps your country should consider leaving already?

Anyway, thank you for clarifying your position and saying, basically, that everything that is bad in the United States happens because its present administration, or one of its previous ones, did not push hard enough for a radically conservative agenda.

Perhaps having a President who was consistently very much more right-wing than Bush Jr. has been would have solved your problems at home. I rather doubt it would have solved your problems abroad.

Again, thanks for the clarifications!

Ann

It's interesting that you think killing all these people would change anything in the long run. Their dying as matyres would have made them an even stronger symbol for others than they already are. Killing someone doesn't mean you have proved that his believes were wrong. Others will follow, others who probably wouldn't have become so radical if the USA hadn't begun this war in the first place.

Revenge is never single sided and no matter how many people you kill, it is impossible to kill an idea. The third Reich may have ceased to exist, but there are still Nazis around the world. In Germany, in the USA and in so many other countries. And there will always be people on this planet who don't consider our "freedom" as their way of living.

I don't know how we are supposed to solve this problem, but I'm sure that war is not the right answer.

Lol. Debunking non-partisan sources with... partisan sources?



Not taking the bait. I can tell a rhetorical question when I see one.

alcyone

For anyone who's interested in some more of the FM thing...

I don't know yet about Raines, since I don't trust the campaigns and I don't trust the right/left blogosphere. As far as I know, the campaign got its info from a Washington Post article. The Washington Post dug for a bit and its people say this:

I don't know how reputable the Post's factchecker is. I get the feeling Politifact and Factchecker are more legit. So I'm hoping they dig around too.

But Factcheck's latest entry gives more information:

About the money:

alcyone

Strange how you can read into it something what isn't there and therefore make a sweeping statement saying that I believed all our problems were due to a lack of conservatism. No where did I say that no problems would exist if our presidents had been rock-ribbed conservative, especially with all the times I've said no one in office was to blame for the dot com disaster. I was merely responding to a request to make some criticisms of Bush since I seemed to be an ardent defender.

Katrina, for instance, was not the responsibility of conservatism versus liberalism. The economic damage and the lost jobs would have happened regardless of competence of the local officials, though the death toll would have likely been far lower. That was mother nature. The only impact of Katrina I've discussed has been its political impacts, with only passing mentions of its economic and human impacts. We now had Hurricane Ike with its impacts on all the people who suffered in Texas and all the damage it caused, which will have its own impact on the economy. It's not in the political arena since the left had not tried to make it political. (I can almost guarantee they really wanted to if Governor Rick Perry of Texas or FEMA had messed up)

One of the major points that hurt the American economy was the fall of the dollar and its consequential impact on commodities. That is neither liberal nor conservative. Some believe a strong dollar is good while others disagree. But to allow it to go into free fall is probably something neither liberals nor conservatives would agree upon.

Not everything I said can be seen in a liberal versus conservative prism, such as the ability to formulate strategies in Iraq. I have no idea whether Casey or Abizaid are conservatives, but Rumsfeld certainly was. And I advocated firing Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney and Condolezza Rice, both ardent conservatives, incorrectly opposed the Surge, but they weren't involved in the decision-making. That point was a black mark on Bush's judgment for not seeing the failing policy earlier and correcting it, conservatism having nothing to do with it. Any sitting president in wartime would have to make similar judgment calls. FDR was good at it, and he was hardly conservative. Lincoln and Johnson were bad at it. Bush was bad at it.

We'll never know for sure if the single defining disaster on Sept. 11, 2001 would have happened if Bill Clinton had been a die-hard conservative and responded in much harsher ways when the various terrorist attacks occurred in his administration. We do know he didn't treat terrorism very seriously, but then again neither did President Bush since we were still believing in the myth that our oceans protected us. Ronald Reagan made mistakes in foreign policy, one of the most disastrous being sending the Marines into Lebanon and then retreating. And Reagan was no liberal.

So you're reading a lot more into what I said than what was actually there, especially since a number of items aren't even conservative/liberal concepts.

A conservative blaming a person for being non-conservative at time... Hmm, now that's shocking.

Now I'm being called a radical. To me, it's simply being conservative. I'm no where near as conservative as many others are, as it may shock you. I'm probably not even the most conservative person on this board, just the most "talkative." (I can think of some here who are more conservative than I am) But that's hardly surprising since people have a tendency to think anyone who isn't quite like them is radical.

Now I'll turn it around. Please heap some praise on President Bush and criticism of Barack Obama for those on the left. I've seen nothing but bitter hatred for President Bush and fawning praise for the Messiah (that's what Republicans believe Barack "He who holds back the waters and heals the planet" Obama thinks he is). By asking, you should know I'd be asking for the reverse.


We would not be in Iraq today if al Qaeda had not attacked first, so we did not start the War on Terror. The war was brought to us. Americans see the War on Terror as a defensive war, not an offensive one. No one likes war, not even conservatives, despite what some people think. I wish we weren't in Iraq, but on the flip side, I think it'd be worse for us in the long run if we weren't there. I wish we didn't have to fight al Qaeda, but we must in order to preserve our way of life, if not preserve our lives. But war is sometimes necessary. I'm glad we're killing al Qaeda by the thousands in Iraq, if only because the dead won't be plotting to destroy our cities. If war is ever deemed unnecessary in all cases, as many on the left do feel, then that makes you even more susceptible to attack as our enemies would consider us weak and ripe for an attack. bin Laden even said as much, seeing our limp responses to previous attacks. He called us a paper tiger and began planning 9/11.

al Qaeda is not an organization that can be talked out of its agenda, but rather is an organization that can only be destroyed or made irrelevant. We've already seen the Sunni Awakening Movement that has turned against al Qaeda. The more people see of their true natures, the less they are supported.

As for al Sadr being a martyr, we've killed hundreds of al Qaeda martyrs (granted he isn't al Qaeda), chief among them Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Yet today, al Qaeda in Iraq is in disarray while recruiting is way down. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy and the one in charge of operations, since we captured one of his letters. Martyrdom hasn't helped al Qaeda much. After a few months, al Sadr would have been forgotten. And we'd have nipped one of Iran's main conduit of influence into Iraq.

Note that we obliged Saddam's request to be a martyr. Yet today many of his Sunni brethren are fighting alongside us, killing al Qaeda.

Actually, it's not rhetorical. I'm genuinely interested in the names of the ones you're afraid of. I'll even promise I won't comment on your answer. I can think of a lot of individuals I'm afraid of who have shaped the way Obama thinks and how he would react. While no one is accusing Obama of being a domestic terrorist, for example, the environment you live in shapes the way you think. Just as Groobie (I hope I got that right) said that she hardly knew any Republicans and was interested in knowing how the other side thought because she didn't know, Obama has never really been exposed to the viewpoints of the other side and therefore would be expected to think similarly to the ones he associated with when he grew up. To me, it's no surprise he's the #1 liberal (even more than self-avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders) in the Senate considering who his associates have been. Many of his associates have been America-haters, believing this country is evil. So again, I'm very curious as to whom you're afraid of who associate with John McCain.

I'll shock you all further. I'd feel A LOT safer if Hillary Clinton were president rather than Barack Obama, and that's saying something.

So you write this:

And everything was going fine until you dropped this:

"Many" "America-haters" "evil"

And I'm supposed to think that you're serious about your first statement? No, right? It's just more posturing so that you can slam Obama.

But just in case I'm misreading you--here's why:

First--the incendiary language doesn't help when you're talking to someone who doesn't agree with you. You're alienating me from the get-go (have been doing so for a while, I add), which undercuts that "genuine" a bit.

Second, content-wise: You do realize you're talking about all the people "who have shaped the way Obama thinks and how he would react" and of those you're focusing on those that just so happen to be the most extreme...

And you truly think that this is a fair assessment? That this is the kind of thing that would lead to dialogue with people who don't agree with you?

Really? O.o

You're kidding, right? You're just messing with me...I mean, I'm pretty left, but I know that while there is some truth to the Bush-McCain connection, there is also much more than that. I don't buy the world of insinuations behind the "90% of the time" gimmick. When it comes to discussions, I think it's an act of good faith to come clean, try to stake a middle ground so to speak.

I guess this is what "middle ground" is to you:

But no, it's not a shock. What a coincidence, the conservative media also has this brand new love Hillary in some weird revisionist history mode (well its kinda fading after the anti-Iran rally thing, but...). If Hillary were running now, you'd be slamming her as somehow suspect on moral grounds as well. Goodness knows if you'd be claiming to want Obama over her even. It's very easy to be cynical with these arguments when they're based on caricatures of the opposing side.

Ultimately, I get no sense of a middle ground from your statements at all, which suggests that any exchange threatens to become a "my candidate is better than yours" exercise. Incidentally, that's where any pointed critique of McCain/his advisors/campaign would lead and why I think it's best for me to move away.

Curbing my very biased outrage at some of what the campaign has done and focusing on defending mine rather than poking at the opposing party when I post is a very conscious choice. Whenever possible, I'd like to avoid being part of an endless back and forth where both sides seem unaware that they're mimicking each other. I can get that on any hard right or left blog.

alcyone

I'm sorry you didn't believe me when I said I was genuinely interested in who you were afraid of because I'm sitting here scratching my head wondering who they could possibly be, but I did mention I would not comment on your reply as a way of reassuring you that I seriously was interested.

In honor of that promise, I will refrain from making any comment even though you didn't actually answer, and I would have had quite a bit to say. The offer is still open if you want to actually reply to my question. And my promise would still stand. I will not make any comments if you answer the question.

Okay, Roger. Instead of making sweeping statements regarding your comments on what you criticize President Bush for, let me examine some of your criticisms in detail and explain why I think your main point is that Bush's problem is that his policy has not been far enough to the right.

The Kennedys are of course a symbol and a beacon of liberal America. If you criticize Bush for co-operating with Ted Kennedy, you are most certainly criticizing him for not being right-wing enough.

Here you criticize him for trying to make war by the book and not overstep international agreements on what amounts to acceptable warmaking. You accuse him of not being a sufficiently ruthless killer. That is a right-wing position in my book.

(The two mistakes that the United States made in Afghanistan are twofold, the way I see it. First, when the Americans were on Osama bin Laden's trail, someone in charge decided that it would be too risky and cost too many American soldiers' lives to confront him directly, since he was holed up somewhere surrounded by armed supporters who had a special knowledge of the terrain that the Americans couldn't match. Therefore, the American troops themselves didn't go after Osama at all, but instead they paid local people whom they considered loyal to the West to risk their lives to capture America's number one enemy. Well, these locals either fled or were bribed not to give Osama's precise location away. In other words, the Americans allowed Osama bin Laden to get away because they were too scared to go after him themselves.

The second and biggest mistake the Americans made in Afghanistan was to basically desert Afghanistan before the job there was done, even though it was Afghanistan that had been the main ally of the real enemy of the United States, Al Queda. Instead President Bush ordered most of his troops to attack Iraq to fight a war against a man who had had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever.)

You keep insisting that tax cuts work wonders for the economy and creates millions of new jobs. According to Scott Lilly's report (see page 7 of his report), the number of jobs created outside the farming sector grew by 3.3% between 2000 and 2007, while during the same period the American population grew by 7%. Effectively there were fewer jobs available for the existing population in 2007 than there had been in 2000.

Scott Lilly also claims that workers were not compensated for their increasing productivity between the years 2000 and 2008. Therefore, the extra money that the American workers generated went not to themselves but almost exclusively to the owners of the factories and other workplaces. The employers grew much richer while those who generated the wealth did not get compensated for their increased productivity at all.

Lilly claims that the huge majority of the Ameircan people became somewhat poorer in actual terms between 2000 and 2006, including those belonging to the 60th to 80th percentile (those whose income is higher than 60-80% of the population). Only those who made more money than 80% of the population made any actual income gains. See page 9 for a graph on how the increase in income was divided between households from different parts of the economic spectrum.

Most of the extra money that was generated between 2000 and 2006 went into corparate profits. According to a graph on page 11, annual corporate profits growth between 1950 and 2000 was 1.9%, but between 2000 and 2006 that figure had risen to 10.5%.

On page 12 of his report, Lilly claims that corporate profits grew much faster than GDP during 2000-2006. Between 1950 and 2000, GDP grew by 368 percent while corparate profits grew by 218 percent. The rise in corporate profits was a little less than two thirds of GDP. In other words, between 1950 and 2000 both corporate profits and GDP grew a lot, but the country as a whole increased its wealth more than the corporations did.

Between 2000 and 2006, however, corporate profit grew by 66%, while GDP grew by only 17%. Most of the fresh new wealth that was generated during this time ended up in corporations (and was probably divided among CEOs and other owners and shareholders). See page 12 of Lilly's report.

I find your claim that tax cuts generates general wealth for the entire nation an extremely right-wing and downright unfounded one.

Again you talk about the tax cuts that Bush did pass as something that created general wealth, when all evidence is that his tax cuts enriched those who were already very wealthy and left almost everyone else worse off. And you criticize him for not making his tax cuts for the rich permanent. If that is not a right-wing position, I don't know what is.

Very many people claim that not only does oil pollute the environment, but America's dependence on oil is the root cause of its dependence on dictators of oil-rich countries in the Middle East.

Anyway, drilling for oil is sure to be a short-term solution. It wasn't long ago that you only needed to drill a hole in Texas and there was so much oil there that it was welling up out of that hole of its own accord. How much oil is left now? In Texas? In the world? How long can we keep solving problems by drilling for oil more and more aggressively?

It takes Mother Nature millions of years, maybe hundreds of millions of years, to turn fossils into oil. But it sure doesn't take humanity long to use up that oil. What are we going to do when it is gone, or when it is so deep down that it is commercially impossible to try to get it to the surface? What then? How about looking aggressively for alternative energy sources instead? Asking for more efforts to get Ameirca more oil, while ignoring its needs for alternative energy, is certainly a right-wing position in my book. And I just read somewhere, maybe in the Lilly report, that Bush had cut down federal grants to agencies and scientists working to find alternative energy sources.

Good! Here you voice a left-wing position and a criticism of Bush from the left.

Here is what an admittedly left-wing colleague of mine claims is the reason for the falling dollar. President Bush's tax cuts made him less able to pay for a war that has cost billions. In order to give himself enough money to keep all those troops in Iraq, President Bush simply demanded that the printing presses work harder and produce more dollars. But when you increase the output of dollars without having the increase of true wealth to back up the increase of dollars, you are bound to have inflation. In other words, the dollar fell because of the increasing output of dollars, which was made to offput the effects of the tax cuts and the underfinanced war in Iraq. Not being willing to see this connection is a right-wing position in my book.

At least you and I share a dislike for Donald Rumsfeld.

I find this claim quite staggering. Your country makes war against another country, and you ask that other country to pay for your war there?

The Bush administration has seen to it that those Iraqis it disliked most have been executed or defeated, and instead it has helped Iraqis it likes better to gain power. Now those Iraqis that the Bush administration helped won't pay you. Well, tough luck. Why don't you leave those Iraqis alone and let them fend for themselves? I agree, it is a bad idea to make war for charity.

Well, wow. Guantanamo is a prison which holds some people who are certainly bona fide terrorists and many people who are almost certainly innocent of any real wrong-doing. And you keep them there, year after year, without trial. And you ask the rest of the world to be impressed because conditions in Guantanmo are better than they are in many American prisons? I'm not sure people abroad are impressed. In fact, I think that all over the world, many people still find your imprisonment of people in Guantanamo without honest trials quite shocking. And in my book, defending Guantanamo is very much a right-wing position.

Kill, kill, kill. Do more killing. Criticizing Bush for not doing enough killing is not to criticize him from the left.

I think you are saying here that the United States should help Israel to attack and bomb Iran. I take it you mean that Israel should be allowed to bomb Iran just because Iran may be building a nuclear device, not because they have actually attacked Israel. If you think that America isn't as respected abroad as it ought to be now, wait until you see how people will react to you if you help Israel bomb Iran just because Iran may be getting itself the kind of weapon that Israel already possesses.

I consider the position that Israel should be allowed to bomb Iran an extremely right-wing one.

So the only thing that Bush did wrong during the Katrina disaster was that he failed to communicate that nothing that happened there was any responsibility of his. I suppose the fact that New Orleans is still suffering badly from the devastations of Katrina has nothing to do with a lack of commitment from the administration to help that city recover.

My point is that if Bush had tried to make a big deal about those 500 rather rusted warheads, he would have been made into a global laughing-stock. So those rustbuckets are what could have destroyed the world in fifteen minutes, or whatever Bush's friend Tony Blair said?

It's amazing that rebate checks to poor people are bound to backfire, while tax cuts to rich people will always work like magic. Clearly Moses must have been given a third tablet on Mount Sinai with an eleventh commandment, Thou shalt always lower taxes for the rich. But maybe that tablet was lost somehow and only resurfaced in the GOP headquarters.

The Lilly report said that the minimum wage was at its lowest level for fifty years when it was adjusted upwards in 2007. (See page 3.) Your position is that an adjustment upwards of wages for the very poorest people is a bad thing, while tax cuts for the richest people is a good thing. How can anyone say that that is not a right-wing position?

Right. Everyone who was against the Iraq war was misinformed. There was absolutely nothing wrong about attacking Iraq, and instead the only problem was that Bush failed to teach the rest of the world that they were wrong and he was right.

There is a story about a proud mother who watched her son taking part in a march. Afterwards she explained that all those other boys in the parade took the wrong kind of steps, and only her son had got it right.

All right, Roger. That is why I think that you are attacking Bush from the right.

Ann

I'll take you up on your offer, Roger, when your statements stop coming off as baiting and disingenuous.

Aw, don't worry, I'm sure you'll find plenty of others to participate in the "my candidate is better than yours" game.



alcyone

I can't heap any praise on George W. Bush, sorry. And since I have not discussed Barack Obama at all, I don't feel obliged to criticize him.

I will, however, heap some praise on the previous Republican Presidents that I can remember:

Richard Nixon: With his 'ping-pong diplomacy' he gave the world hope that tensions between the United States and China would lessen. The way I remember it, there were some real fears that there might be a devastating war between the U.S. and China, but Nixon's successful trip to China changed all that.



Nixon shakes hands with Mao. The world breathes easier.

Gerald Ford: He did a more than adequate job at a difficult time, considering the circumstances during which he took office. He ended the war in Vietnam, which had done very serious damage to America's image abroad.



Gerald Ford ended the Vietnam war.

Ronald Reagan: He was someone I had several objections to, particularly over his supply-side economics.

But the man was amazingly presidential and inspirational. He always seemed at ease and perfectly comfortable and confident in his role as the most powerful man in the world. He was fantastically charming and charismatic. What is more, he never seemed to lose that aura of honesty. When he said, 'Mr Gorbachev, please tear down this wall,' how could the world fail to be impressed? And how could the Berlin wall fail to come down a few years later?



Ronald Reagan, amazingly presidential. The Berlin wall didn't stand a chance.

George Herbert Walker Bush: Compared with Reagan, Bush Senior was charmless and dry. But in his own way, he, too, was so very presidential. I was extremely impressed with how he handled the Gulf War of 1991. I was very shocked myself when Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Quwait, and I very much wanted the United States to teach him a lesson. Bush Senior did so with amazing skill. He managed to forge an alliance with almost the entire Arab world. Consider that! The United States led the Arab world in a war against Iraq, and basically everyone thought that the war was justified! And rarely has the world been so sympathetic to Israel, which was attacked by Iraq during that war, and rarely has the world been so unsympathetic to the Palestinians, who chose to support Saddam Hussein in this war.



George Herbert Walker Bush handled the Gulf War masterfully.

As you can see, all these Republican Presidents have done important things to inspire the world, to turn the world into a better place, and to make the world feel good about America. But what about 'Number 43', George W. Bush? I don't think he has done anything at all to make the world a safer place, and he has most certainly failed miserably at inspiring the world and making the world feel good about America. Two years ago, John Bolton, formerly President Bush's appointed ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview on Swedish radio that when the United States intervenes somewhere in the world, it only has its own best interests at heart, and it doesn't care about what its interventions do to other nations and other people.

What do you think that sort of thing sounds like to the world?

But I have one thing to say for George W. Bush. It could be that he was a better President than John McCain will turn out to be, if he is elected. How so? It has to do with how I think of George W Bush's and McCain's respective temperaments.

I think Reagan and Bush Sr. both had brilliant 'presidential temperaments'. They could remain calm, make good decisions, stay strong without appearing aggressive, and they could inspire others.

My prime objection to Bush Junior's temperament is precisely that he comes across as - Junior. I don't get the feeling that he has any of the wisdom and quiet competence of his father, but rather that he is full of a need to prove himself as good as his father. But unlike his father, he doesn't seem to be really and truly interested in the complexities and demands of the role of being President. Bush Jr. seems a lot more cut off from the real world than his father, who very much seemed to understand the world that he had to influence and guide to the best of his ability.

However, I have never heard anyone accuse Bush Jr. of being aggressive. And I have never heard anyone accuse him of being short-tempered. I have also never heard him speak flippantly about waging war against other nations.

McCain, on the other hand, sang in a public speech that America should 'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran'. The lack of judgement and the lack of presidential restraint that goes into such a song is staggering. Doesn't he realize what that sort of thing sounds like to the rest of the world?

McCain sings \'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran\'

The New York Times has repeatedly described McCain as short-tempered. Yes, I realize that the NYT wants to paint McCain in a negative light. But judging from several YouTube clips I have seen, I think it is reasonable to question his ability to stay cool. And this man - singing 'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran', doing a bit of a John Wayne swagger, and having trouble controlling his temper - is he America's next President?

I'll say this for George W. Bush. He was never short-tempered, and even though he bombed Iraq, he never sang songs about bombing them. Or about bombing Iran.

Ann

The National Journal's cover story is a really insightful article on the Bush presidency, which takes a view I've seldom seen. It's really interesting.

alcyone