I would like to remind everyone that every time I wrote a blog post about the housing bubble or the Bush administration’s general path to drive this economy into the ground, a bunch of conservatives would show up to oh-so-patiently explain to me that my wee little lady brain doesn’t understand economics. Ever heard of supply and demand? The fact that wee lady brains are attached to wee lady arms that pull voting levers is reason enough, you see, to get economic decisions out of voters hands and make the management of our economy a de facto dictatorship. But buck up, campers! The United States took the path of many third world dictatorships before us, of having an ubercapitalist moron drive up our debts and destroy our economy in hopes of putting economic management out of the reach of our democracy, but we were able to get here without military coups or rounding up dissenters to be disappeared. We elected our own asshole, and the only lives lost on our soil were taken by terrorists. True, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in Iraq, but that was just a very expensive side hobby for your President, albeit one that helped dismantle our functioning economy. By shock doctrine standards, we got off relatively easy.
It’s debatable if the Bushies are competent managers. From the more forgiving perspective, they’re just morons who were so dedicated to conservative ideology that they just let the economic run into an iceberg. Or, if you’re more cynical, they deliberately screwed the pooch, figuring that by bankrupting the economy, the could bankrupt the government and finally it would be small enough to, in the immortal words of Grover Norquist, be drowned in a bathtub. I’d like to believe the former, but on the other hand, the demands for a huge check and blanket authority that has to be given now! right this second! before you have a chance to change your mind! tend to shut down even the most generous parts of my brain. I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, blogger to point out that inducing a state of panic was exactly the strategy used by the Bushies when they wanted the Iraq War. No time! Can’t let the inspectors finish their job (and prove that we’re lying)! Same methods, so I’m guessing same lies and same final intention—-to line the pockets of their friends while continuing to run our economy into the ground so that we’ll never be able to recover an America with a broad middle class that feels secure.