ttogreh

You know, everyone says that 80 year number. Which makes me wonder what exactly happened about eighty years ago. Oh, yeah... the great depresssion. Now, how did we get out of the great depression again? Oh... right, massive government spending on both the domestic and foreign fronts. So... what kept us away from the old ten to fifteen year boom and bust cycles after the war? Oh, right... the regulatory structure built after the great depression. Until the S & L crisis, which was a direct result of deregulation. How did we get out of that? Oh, yeah... massive government foreign policy spending under Reagan, which brought about huge deficits. What has caused this current economic crisis? Oh, yeah... deregulation (and poor regulation) of the housing market under Clinton and Bush. What will we do about this? Hopefully, we will return to prudent and effective regulation of the economy, after we are done spending massive amounts of money on domestic projects. It's the same old story. People that want deregulation create these astroturf Tea parties to get people that do not understand macroeconomics to protest that which has worked twice already. See, the people that are happy with fifteen year boom and bust cycles don't have 401Ks. They have trust funds.

Oh, I don't ignore that Bush inherited a slew of problems that were deferred by the Clinton administration, the foremost being the mortgage mess. However, if there ever was a better example of everything the man touched turning to shit short of what King John of England experienced, I don't know what it is. I simply am railing against the false assertion that Obama is ruining the economy, or worse, that the economy is in such bad shape because of what Obama has done in the last less than 13 weeks. I mean if there ever was a better example of manic denial of the facts, I don't know what it would be.

Candyman, it's not a matter of trying and failing. It is a matter of just doing it, and screwing up so badly that historians say Bush in the same breath as Ulysses S. Grant. Seriously, he had transnational support and an domestic entire public behind him after the attacks of September 11, 2001. He had majorities in both houses of congress, and a sympathetic supreme court. What did he do with it? You know what he did with it. Gaf knows what he did with it. Everybody else knows what he did with it. And yet Gaf, Cher, and yourself continue to apologize for the man. I am pointing out that the emperor is naked, and you three are billing Obama for the cost of Bush's pants.

No, to try and fail is not worse than doing nothing at all. To fail when you saw the problem, knew what the solution was, and had the ability to stop it is worse than doing nothing at all. Bush is like a fireman who killed someone in a burning building with his axe while trying to break down a door to save that same person. It would have been better if he had just stayed at the firehouse.

Oh, no. I care about the facts. Obama and McCain were not all that different. They both voted for TARP, after all. However, the argument that the Bush administration actually tried to get the foxes out of the henhouse does nothing to change the fact that they failed. They had six years, 2,191 days, to fix this problem when they had House and Senate majorities. They didn't. Gaf, trying to avert a problem and failing when you had all the tools to do the job right is worse than doing nothing at all.

... Why do people forget that the TARP was enacted under the Bush administration? Or that Fannie and Freddie were taken over under the Bush administration under guidelines set by that administration? Why do people think that a man who has been inaugurated less than 13 weeks ago caused these problems that were years in the making? ... Oh right, they are ideologues that don't care about the facts.

Well, she was either mentally incapacitated, or suicidal. Sane people don't jump into polar bear enclosures. Still, this does seem like prime material for a Darwin Award "honorable mention", as long as we are being mean.

Well, in the case of the "Maersk Alabama", I think the Somali pirates did not know it was a US flagged ship. Or at least did not realize it until it was too late. See, I just heard this on the news... the captain is safe. Three of the pirates are dead by US snipers, and the fourth is in custody. He was on the American warship "negotiating a settlement". Seriously... don't point your Ak-47 at an American citizen when a warship is 100 feet off your lifeboat. Yes, that is what happened.

This went from zero to horrible in record time.

... Grit your teeth and wait for it to be over? On the bright side, you'll never have hemhorhoids again...

He's ten years old. I preferred the company of boys over girls when I was ten, too. I'm not gay (but if I were gay, my point would still be valid). I think this Polish politician has a poor understanding of elephant sexuality.

I pacl them away quite readily when I feel the need to do so, gaf. As for your cowardly attempt to weasel out of this... The burden of proof is ALWAYS on the one making an assertion. I don't need to exhaustively search through ten years of your posts to prove what YOU say is true. That's YOUR job. MY job, is to cherry pick one... ONE prediction out of ten years worth of posts that did not come true, or did not come completely true. Do you understand what I am saying here? You didn't put your foot in your mouth when you said "Every prediction I have made in the last ten years has come true". You cut your foot off, barbecued it, and shat it out. Still, I am going to give you a chance. Go ahead. Say that you were imprecise, or inarticulate, or that you typed without fully thinking through what you were saying. I am going to make a prediction myself here. You aren't going to do it. You are going to feebly brush this post off, and continue to gamble on the Obama administration being an unmitigated disaster beyond anything either of us has ever experienced. By the way gaf, I don't write these posts for your benefit. I write them for all the lurkers or other posters that are not sure of which way to fall on things. I expose your utterly laughable world view as a public service. I am not trying to embarass you. That would be pointless.

Indeed, that is the crux of this issue. The Somali pirates are simply too small of a problem that are too easily bought off with insurance money for there to be strong international support to actually go in to Somalia and clear out the pirate nests. Four Somali pirates have one American captain in a lifeboat with no gas... with an American Warship fully capable of pacifying an entire city bearing down on it. The UN has authorized anti-piracy incursions into Somalia. Nobody has done it, because it's too much of a hassle for too small of a problem.

Phee, you know where this is going. It's all been done before. Gaf makes a ludicrous assertion. I call him on it. He tries to back out of it. I call him on it again. It eventually boils down to the fact that Gaf is addicted to a binary world view that simply is laughable to anyone that knows about nuance. It's all happened before. It never changes. Lock the thread, don't lock the thread, I'll keep going. So will Gaf.

Wow. That's spectacularly poor strategy on your part. If Obama barely maintains federal sovereignty and we have a peaceful election of a new president in four or eight years, you will have to eat crow. Assuming that the man is actually competent and his policies begin to effect positive change, you will have to eat crow. If he is impeached and we get a new president, you will have to eat crow. If the federal government of the United States of America is dissolved and we are a squabbling disunion in four to eight years, you will be hailed as a prophet by the few of us left alive. I cannot even begin to fathom what compels you to actually believe the nuttiness that you spew out on a regular basis.

Nixon and McGovern campaigned on ending the war. Bush failed at deflating the mortgage bubble. Try again.

Lol wat? The Viet Nam war came to a close under Presidential decree because Nixon knew the score. The Iraq war changed course because Bush knew the score. Democrats are a diverse bunch, but partisan fearmongers are all the same. Bush did nothing to stop the mortgage bubble from popping. What exactly did you prove wrong, here?

If you want to play ball, Gaf, you had better wear a cup. You claimed that "Democrats" wanted him (Bush) to fail. Do you want to refine your statement to be "some people who affiliate themselves with the Democratic party", or are you going to continue to use that old tired Black-and-White binary line of thinking where "Democrats" are all the same, think the same thoughts, and are a monolithic bloc that must be fought against by all free thinking people everywhere? We've had this conversation before Gaf. It goes the same way, every time.

James Carville is not a member of congress, and is indeed as much a partisan hack as Rush Limbaugh is. Get me a quote from an elected Democrat.

Yeah, obviously the only way that Congress can end a war is by denying footsoldiers bullets. Right. Do you have any idea how Viet Nam ended?

Quotes with sources, or it never happened.

Uh-huh. Let's just forget that unless Bush turned it around, Congress would have pulled the plug immediately.

Cher, you aren't even using the correct terminology. The senate confirms cabinet appointments, but Bush is the one that makes those appointments. No one elects the cabinet. And the only Cabinet member that was a Democrat was the secretary of transportation. He resigned when he saw how much of a tool he was being made into, by the way. Bush squandered six years of congressional majority on a failed war strategy, and a failed domestic agenda... and he has no one to blame but himself. The war in Iraq finally started getting better when Bush lost the House of Representatives. That is not a coincidence.

Cher... Bush had six years of Congressional majority to tackle the mortgage bubble. He instead used it to finance an unnecessary war, and implemented stimuluses to keep it going just a little longer. He was banking on the house of cards failing some time after November. It failed in September. You know I am right.

This is where the fallacy of the excluded middle comes back to bite those that have come to rely on it without any other option. If Obama does OK, just OK, all of this fear mongering and declaration of failure falls flat and is exposed as what it is, a fallacy. If Obama succeeds outright, which is unlikely due to the utter mess that he has inherited, all of this fear mongering falls flat, and the fallacy is exposed. If Obama fails outright, which is highly unlikely due to his cautious deliberate nature, the fear mongers will have just that much longer to parlay their fallacy. So... the partisans are banking on downright, fantastic failure, unmitigated by any reasonable persons expectations of difficulty in achieving the task at hand. In short, the fearmongers, of which Gaf has associated himself with, are gambling that Obama is a paper tiger, and that the inherent lack of substance so obvious to themselves is exposed for all to see. It is an ideological blind spot which will further erode their power. It is at both sad to watch and utterly satisfying to have ones beliefs reaffirmed.