1 Boring Old Man

Bush’s Final Fiasco
By Harold Meyerson

^{… Herbert Hoover, we should recall, had a program for dealing with the Depression. It consisted of lending to banks but opposing fiscal stimulus or direct aid to individuals. Which is why Hank Paulson’s frenzied endeavors to prop up the banking sector and Bush’s dogged resistance to assisting anybody else amount to pure neo-Hooverism.}

^{As the 1930s began, Hoover believed that the coordinated actions of the private sector could save the beleaguered economy. It soon became apparent that the only action that private-sector businesses could agree upon was closing down factories and offices and throwing people out of work. Under immense pressure to do something, in late 1931 Hoover asked Congress to establish the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to provide funds to banks it deemed creditworthy. By 1932, the RFC was making loans. Yet with the economy in free fall, the rate of bank failures increased until Hoover’s successor, Franklin Roosevelt, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.}

^{Having done his bit to bail out the banks, however, Hoover rested. He opposed provisions that would have enabled homeowners to hang on to their homes. As breadlines lengthened, he vetoed a bill appropriating funds for public works on the grounds that it was inflationary and contained pork-barrel spending. Bankers would be saved; everyone else was effectively damned…}

^{In a sense, Bush’s inactivity is even less excusable than Hoover’s. Unlike Hoover, Bush could learn from the successes of New Deal and World War II – era programs to revive the economy. Keynes’s general theory of how to defeat depressions wasn’t around when Hoover was president, but it’s been with us now for 72 years. What’s more, virtually every reputable conservative economist, from Martin Feldstein on down, now supports a government stimulus program. But Bush, drawing on no known body of economic thought, remains opposed. (So does Republican House leader John Boehner, who seems determined to elevate stupidity to a party principle.) And with each passing day, the economic hole out of which we will have to climb grows deeper.}

^{So where’s the outrage? Why aren’t demonstrators besieging the White House? Where are the "Welcome to Bushville" signs in those neighborhoods where abandoned homes outnumber the occupied ones? The answer, I suspect, is that you can only irreversibly give up on a president once. Further catastrophic failures on the president’s part elicit only diminishing returns. Buchanan did nothing while the South seceded: That was it for him. Hoover did nothing as farmers, workers and middle-class America got wiped out: With that, he was beyond rehabilitation. Nixon had Watergate: Enough said. One mega-strike and you’re out.}

^{Bush, however, has had three. He misled us into a nearly endless war of choice to disarm a threat that never really existed. He let a great American city drown. And now he stands by while the economic security of tens of millions of Americans is vanishing. Yet in the hearts of his countrymen, Bush’s place is already fixed. Even before the financial collapse, he was in the ninth circle of presidential hell, with Buchanan and Hoover. At his own party’s national convention this summer, his was the name that no one dared speak. And so, though his mishandling of the economy is criminally inept, he is being spared one more outbreak of public rage by two countervailing public sentiments: Americans’ relief that he soon will be gone and their kind reluctance to kick a corpse.}

That’s his M.O. – not acting quickly and decisively, then doing something very wrong that meets some kooky agenda – one that can be traced to the foul and simplified thoughts of his pal, Dick Cheney. The War in Iraq is a good example. Katrina – well Bush went Marie Antoinette’s "let them eat cake" one better. He and John McCain ate cake themselves. So, I’ve been glad about Bush’s torpor. I read that he’s working on his legacy with Karl Rove at the White House. It’s the modern version of Nero’s violin solo around the fire in Rome. Fine with me.

But there’s another reason I’m not expecting much. I live in Georgia. It’s a beautiful place and I like the people – the escaping Atlantans I hang around with and the people who grew up here. But, they don’t read the Washington Post. For that matter, they don’t even read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They read the Pickens Progress – a surprisingly good weekly filled with local news. The television monitors, when there are any, default to Fox News. I think the radios are tuned to Country, Rock, or Gospel music and probably Rush Limbaugh. Last night, Georgia elected Saxby Chambliss to return to Washington as our Senator, 4:1 in my County.

I try to say things that explain why that happened, but they’re just attempts to put things into words that which cannot be spoken. When the guy down the street said, "I ain’t voting for no Muslim," I  just didn’t exactly know what to say. When I saw the Saxby Chambliss ads, the horrible Saxby Chambliss ads, I kind of knew that my friend Jim Martin didn’t have a prayer of getting elected. Oh we gave the money, and did the calling thing. We put out the sign and pasted on the stickers. But those ads, the main information that gets beamed into this place, were awful, simply awful. And Saxby was on Fox frequently. I didn’t see that for obvious reasons, but I read about it in the blogs. And why don’t people see that those ads can’t possibly be true?

There’s a complex set of notions about memes [meme (miːm): comprises any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation]. There’s a meme here that can’t be put into words easily. It has always been here. It’s about other people messing in your business, telling you what to do or how to be, trying to change things. It’s about Xenophobia [xe·no·pho·bia (ze-nÉ™-ˈfō-bÄ“-É™): fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign]. In this case, outsiders, like Jim Martin from Atlanta [Chambliss is from Moultrie, Georgia.] Chambliss spent his first term as Senator as a Bu$hCo hit man and lobbying for his campaign contributors. What he ran on was that Jim Martin is a nasty evil Liberal and that Chambliss has Conservative values [unspecified].