No History for W

For those who missed it, check Jeffry St. Clair's August 31, 2004 article — 'High Plains Grifter, The life and crimes of George W Bush. Pt 1. Ties that Blind' republished at CounterPunch.

Well said. I agree, though I admit to feeling a profound desire for justice bordering on revenge.

Also, I had to look up "adumbrate." I thought it sounded like something somebody called me recently.

The serious consequences of the action and inaction taken over the last eight years do seem lost on too many people. And the delusional and protective thinking of those who admire (or claim to) this jackal of a man is infuriating.

Thanks for your work George. I always look forward to the next class. Even when the last one had a vocabulary quiz.

Hi
Sorry, but I can't agree. We shouldn't forget Bush, but try to understand him and study him. The sorry fact is that the United States has changed in many ways not possible to imagine ten years ago. I would never have thought that I would associate torture with government policy in the United States and hear leading experts defend it. We need to understand why this happened, so we can prevent it from ever happening again.

Instead of trying to understand Bush (probably not a herculean task), we must try to understand why Americans came so close to electing him twice. What is there about our culture, our political discourse, and our understanding of the world that permits people who ostensibly love their country to vote for someone who is destroying it?

Whatever flaws we have that permit 49% of Americans to vote for someone whose policies are detrimental to their welfare, we need to identify them and correct them.

I have to agree at this point with Robert Petersen. Forget the witch hunt stuff right now. That will not help us at all. We can blame both Bush and Congress, both democrat and republican, for all the stupidity of the last eight years. It was our Congress especially the lack of oversight who allowed these policies to get out of control.

Right now it is best that we immediately review and overhaul the systems that has been put in place over the last eight years to ensure that we never make the same blunders again. That would also include a review of DHS and FEMA. The monster we built to enhance our security needs to be taken down a notch or two.

Our foreign policy needs to be repaired badly and put back on track.

Our economy needs CPR right now, without making government the total answer. Time to balance the budget or at least get the budget under control.

Now President Obama can do one of two things. Fix it or ... make it worse...

[Trying to balance the budget got FDR into trouble in his second term. In the short run government spending, even to the point of just printing money, hardly matters given the huge quantity of money that was destroyed last year — that just vanished — and the fact is deflation is a much worse problem than inflation. In the longer run balance will come not from scaling down social programs, but from cutting military spending and raising taxes on the rich, policies that nobody around Obama (yet) has dared to suggest, and from building up our industrial base with better jobs and hence more tax revenue. g.]