Crisis, What Crisis?

“If we don’t act now this sucker might go down…” – President George W. Bush.

 

While I find it a bit alarming that the President of the United States refers to the world’s largest economy as “this sucker,” I must admit that I feel some real anxiety after listening to the news on the radio and hearing about the near daily financial domino falling without any actual plan in place to recover from this meltdown.  I can’t say that I entirely understand or support the Paulson proposal that went down in the House yesterday but, at the same time, I can’t tell whether its supporters, the more left leaning Democrats or right leaning Republicans have the right answer to this enormous problem.

 

I do know that the partison grandstanding helps the situation not at all.  Yesterday, at noon when it seemed like the package would pass, John McCain spoke and took credit for driving the bill through demonstrating his superior leadership.  By three in the afternoon, though, he blamed the Speaker of the House for making a partison speech that hurt the feelings of a number of Republicans so badly that they would put aside their concern for our national economy to cry foul and change their vote.  Do our elected officials really find trivial statements so alarming that they will change their vote just to get some measure of revenge.

 

Meanwhile the Speaker and the Minority Leader obviously didn’t count their votes before bringing the bill to a floor vote and, instead of holding back until they could guarantee passage of some sort of legislation, they lost and scared the poop out of Wall Street causing the largest point drop in the history of the Dow.  What were they thinking?

 

On Sunday, both McCain and Obama endorsed the bill but neither seems to have the so-called “juice” to get their respective parties to rally behind them and their positions on such an important issue.  I did find Senator Obama’s calming statements yesterday, without partison venom, to sound very much like a leader as he explained that, although congress didn’t succeed yesterday, that they will get something done soon.  Obama didn’t blame either party but, rather, explained how complex legislation can take time and isn’t pretty to watch being made.

 

On the presidential race, on Friday night at the debate, John accused Obama of being reckless for “saying out loud” that he would support strikes across the border into Pakistan if our intelligence said that the bad guys were their.  On Saturday, Sarah said the same thing as Obama, on Sunday, the McCain campaign tried to explain away her statement as, although quite explicit, being somehow different from Obama’s position.  Meanwhile, Joe Biden made a claim the FDR went “on the television in 1929” for one of his fireside chats to help calm the markets and the population – this has the two problems: FDR didn’t take office until 1933 (Hoover was president in 1929) and the only televisions around were prototypes. 

 

Why is it that nothing seems to make sense anymore?  Have I fallen through the looking glass or were all of those Lyndon Larouche conspiracy nutcases actually right?

 

-- End

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3481 (20080929) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com