I said it for years while George W. Bush was riding high and the neocons were flying their little antenna American flags on their SUV's and calling everyone who criticized Bush/neocon policies "unpatriotic" and"America haters"...I remember telling my Dad, "this Iraq war will bankrupt the country. It is all being financed by massive debt. The chickens will come home to roost." And sure enough that is a significant part of the reason we are in such a hole. When you compile the Iraq War with the UN-regulated fat cat Wall Street piracy at taxpayer expense (Bush tax cuts and crony giveways and sweetheart capitalism)...when you take the years of trickle down (it didn't trickle down, it trickled over to Switzerland and to offshore accounts in the Bahamas and into more mansions and into derivative speculation and merger-mania).....The taxpayer was lulled into a false sense of security while the GOP was giving away the store. And the Democrats were too afraid of being called "unpatriotic" to stand up to the Republicans for most of Bush's two terms. In fact they never really have stood up to the Republicans that well, even now even though the Republicans are now in the minority and shouldn't be getting the megaphone they are getting and Obama and the Democrats are still not calling them on their lies and obfuscations about major reforms that need to happen.
We are in danger now of California going bankrupt and if that happens it will destroy any hope of national recovery. Also, the stimulus money is getting out too slowly and any good it is doing is being swallowed up by a continued severe downturn. The Republicans hope to drag their feet and ally with the Blue Dogs to pull Obama's reforms down and pick him apart with slander and naysaying. And Obama isn't forceful enough in confronting them however he has to to put a stop to it. He needs to stop being a rock star overseas and stay home and knock heads.
The public is losing patience with Obama's plans even now. They are tired of waiting for the recovery to start. That isn't Obama's fault. The same public sat on its hands for all eight Bush years and yet again for the Reagan and Daddy Bush years and let all this happen without a peep.
So we ARE in a hole so deep I'm afraid we will have, as Robert Reich just said recently, a permanently anemic, jobless "recovery". At the very time we need a second stimulus, we've hit our national debt ceiling and the Chinese are reluctant to keep on financing our spending even though it is necessary to save their investment of over a trillion dollars they have here now (don't hold me to that figure, I may be wrong, it may be much more if you include "off the books" spending done by Bush during the Iraq War. And Obama needs to get out of Afghanistan. That is a constant drag on our debt load while it takes continued multiple hundreds of billions to put our finger in the dike over in Afghanistan.
We have lot of traps and pitfalls on the horizon and I fear that for all his efforts and good intentions, there may just be too many wild cards for Obama to deal with. And our fickle, ungrateful public will start listening to Republican hypocritical nitpicking the longer the surging mortgage meltdown and unemployment (not necessarily in that order) continue.
We are nowhere near out of the woods. I just hope that Obama and the Democrats pay attention to what is happening in California. That is the front line of GOP efforts to torpedo the Obama presidency and Arnold Swastika-negger is their poster boy for dismantling the California social safety net. If he succeeds there and the Democrats don't get some backbone and demand a few tax increases to mitigate the severity of all the budget cuts, then California, more than a tenth of the US economy will be the black hole that sucks away any good Obama's stimulus has done.
As California goes, so goes the nation sooner or later.
You can thank the good old GOP for most of this mess, and for its obstructism even now after they put us all in the poorhouse they're not done yet doing their damage and demanding a return to the failures of the Bush years. We have a goodly number of dumb bunnies in the public who still listen to the GOP's lies and distortions and naysaying.
We are in a perilous time and the Republicans are doing everything they can to torpedo the Democrats and destroy their reforms so they can cause public backlash against them. The major tv networks are willing collaborators with the GOP's dirty work, giving them inordinate megaphone for their destructiveness.
We need the progressive Democrats to grow some stones and insist on playing hard ball with the GOP just as the GOP did with the Democrats when they were riding high. Give them what they dished and keep on doing it. We need to fight their obstructionist fire with hardball. It is all they understand. Otherwise, kiss Obama's presidency and any hope of reforms goodbye and by extension, kiss the whole USA goodbye. We will descend into sci-fi-like future of misery and chaos if the GOP gets back into the White House and/or Congress anytime soon.
