A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Hissing the 'H' Word at Bush

This is the third or fourth negative article I've seen about Dubya at UPI in the past week, and the harshest yet. As many of you know, UPI, along with The Washington Times, is owned by Sun Myung Moon, who has been very, very tight with the Bush family, and conservatives in general. So why are they now comparing him to Herbert Hoover?

The conclusion that Bush's economic and political record could be as catastrophic -- at least -- as that of Herbert Hoover, the hapless president who endured three and half years of the Great Depression without being able to do anything useful about it, rests on, unfortunately, on much more than the parallels between the Great Wall Street Crash of October 1929, and the one now fitfully unfolding before our eyes, although that is the obvious place to start.

First, the epochal scale of the current market slide -- even taking into account the 1,200 point rally in the Dow Jones Index we have just seen -- is now clear. And the grim dimensions of the crisis that we have been warning would come if Bush did not change his over-optimistic and, it now appears, highly irresponsible fiscal policies are now obvious to all.

***

As Hutchinson and our Chief Economics Correspondent Ian Campbell have been noting with alarming regularity in recent weeks, Bush has already fallen deeply into the classic Herbert Hoover groove of blindly and mindlessly repeating his mantra that business conditions an economic fundamentals are sound when it is clear to all that they are far from sound. And any freshman student of Economics 101 could tell you why --even if they didn't have the benefit of Yale and Harvard Business School degrees, as Bush does.

Even worse, Bush has already enthusiastically echoed Hoover -- and abandoned the great William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan traditions of tough, cool-nerved and reassuring leadership in difficult times.

The UPI is much diminished lately, and is no longer a major news source on the level of the AP, Reuters, AFP, or even Bloomberg. And, as of today, Moon's other media mouthpiece is still pushing for war with Iraq. Still, this is looking more and more like a serious crack in the facade of right-wing unity. We can only hope.

posted by David at 8/22/2002 11:34:00 AM ::

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