Bad American

No recession, capiche? (AP)

Associated Press 

But you have to wonder is he really this clueless or is he being deliberately obtuse?

Perhaps a clue from the story:

On one issue particularly worrisome to American consumers, there are indications that paying $4 for a gallon of gasoline is not out of the question once the summer driving season arrives. Asked about that, Bush said “That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that. … I know it’s high now.”

Earth to Bush. . . oh, never mind. He’s never lived in the real world in his life.

Bush also telegraphed optimism about the U.S. dollar, which has been declining in value.

The US$ vs. the Euro.

And more!

AP: Economy Slows to a Near Crawl

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product increased at a scant 0.6 percent pace in the October-to-December quarter. The reading — unchanged from an initial estimate a month ago — underscored just how much momentum the economy has lost. In the prior quarter, the economy clocked in at a brisk 4.9 percent pace.

snip

The housing picture looked even more bleak in the new report.

Builders slashed spending on housing projects by a whopping 25.2 percent on an annualized basis in the fourth quarter, the biggest cut in 26 years.

And, even though economic growth slowed, inflation picked up — an ominous mix that could spell further trouble for the economy.

As if the newly confirmed fourth-quarter GDP figure of 0.6 percent wasn’t chilling enough, the Labor Department reported Thursday that new applications for unemployment insurance benefits rose by 19,000 to 373,000 last week, more evidence that the general economic sluggishness is spilling over into the job market.

Will somebody please tell the Captain that the Titanic is taking on water?

Not, of course, in all fairness, that either of the Democratic candidates have a clue either. But this didn’t happen on their watch.

Mike Whitney:

New York Governor Elliot Spitzer has joined Dodd in criticizing the so-called “regulatory agencies” for failing to determine whether any securities laws were broken. In a Washington Post article, Spitzer blasted the SEC’s inaction saying that the Bush Administration would be judged by history as a “willing accomplice” to the subprime collapse.

But Spitzer and Dodd are wasting their breath. The culture of corruption from 7 years of Bush misrule has spread like Kudzu to every jag and eddy in Washington. If we were really a nation of laws rather than nincompoops, federal agents would be busy rounding up every investment banker and hedge fund sharpie on Wall Street so they could get to the bottom of the subprime boondoggle. Regulators still haven’t even decided whether it was a case of overzealous marketing of dodgy securities or downright fraud. That should be “job one” for the SEC.

And by the time the new POTUS takes office we could be in far deeper than a recession. Whitney again:

Bank of America’s proposed $739 billion bailout is just the first of many hyper-inflationary, economy-busting trial-balloons we can expect to see in the near future. The banking system is in terminal distress; collapsing from hundreds of billions in worthless assets, bad bets, and poor decision-making. Their capital impairment problems were all brought on by themselves. And they should be forced to pay the consequences, whatever that may be. They managed to take a simple, revenue-generating activity like mortgage lending, and turn it into a textbook case of grand larceny. It’s pathetic.

  In their present condition, many of the banks will be back for another handout in a matter of months. Next will be commercial real estate (CRE) which is already slumping and on its way down. Then it’ll be the $160 billion in private equity deals and leveraged buyouts (LBOs) which need refinancing. Then it’ll be the maxed-out credit cards, and delinquent student loans and defaulting car loans all of which are failing at a faster and faster pace. It is not just the “structured investment” market that’s unraveling now; it’s the whole speculative paradigm of hyper-inflated assets, toxic bonds, over-priced equities and bizarre-sounding derivatives which are crashing down in one great debt waterfall. The investment banks are at the very center of the problems. They’ve played it fast and loose from the very beginning and now they’ve come up snake-eyes. Tough luck. Only they shouldn’t count on a $700 billion freebie from Uncle Sam to make up for their own bad judgment.

And I wonder when Gore Vidal passes, if he’ll get a similar treatment on the inside 2a page.

With Kevin O’Brien around, don’t hold your breath. Or if he does, you can bet it will be a smear of him writing ‘anti-American’ works.

Yet, Bill Curry writes an excellent tribute to Buckley today in HuffPo:

Buckley loved debate. Unlike today’s cowardly conservatives, he debated the best minds he could entice on to a stage. He never used his opponents as props or punch lines for fixed fights. He liked them. Loving his own ideas, not just hating theirs, left room for liking them.

What a long sad fall from Bill Buckley to Bill O’ Reilly. I’m not part of the crowd that says if we can just get along everything will be alright. But I am part of the crowd that thinks learning to get along better will help.

To get out of Iraq or into a new health care system will require some hard fighting, but also some hard thinking and most of all reasoned arguments to persuade, if not the opposition, certainly the public.

If you want to see how far we are from having that kind of debate, watch an old episode of Firing Line and then watch a random hour of live cable television. That’s how far.

Unfortunately, Bill Buckley’s bastard stepchildren wish to pick up his mantle but lack the intellectual rigor to do so:

Bondaroid (See profile | I’m a fan of Bondaroid)

DerekRC (See profile | I’m a fan of DerekRC)

The reality is that William F. Buckley is just like modern conservatives. It is the modern liberal (progressive), or whatever the hell they want to call themselves tomorrow has become totally unhinged. Following the lunacy of Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and the troll like behavior of John Stewert, todays liberals have lost touch with reality. “Hate America”, “Blame America” and calling our military men and women murderers is the policy of today’s liberals.“We surrender” is the plea of Democrats to the world. Apparently this self-hatred strengthens America’s positon in the world according to the logic of todays liberals.William F. Buckley can rest in peace. Unfortunately, until the danger of radical islam is confronted in this world, we can not.

These are, of course, people who don’t even know the real history of their country, let alone received a classic liberal arts education. Mention ‘Augustinian’ to any of these new right troglodytes and you’d probably get a blank stare. Buckley could go on long dissertations on the influence of St. Augustine on traditional and modern Catholicism and how that religious tradition formed the basis of much of modern law.

This bunch thinks Ronald Reagan was an example of superior intellect and haven’t the faintest idea what Barry Goldwater actually landed up believing. Nor do they really want to know.For this generation of conservatives has no time for the drawing room debate style of a William F. Buckley. Unfortunately, what has arisen in this country is a generation of conservative street fighters who haven’t the faintest conception of winning an argument on merits, yet they are quick to label liberals ‘emotional!’The problem is that Buckley’s generation was raised in a far more thoughtful and contemplative era where television and the mass media hadn’t yet coarsened public debate or turned it into a commodity to be marketed for television.Buckley saw what was happening to conservatism and, especially, at his gift to conservatism The National Review, now run by the insufferable Jonah Goldberg. Yet his criticism was muted.

Buckley understood that the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq was not good for this country from an economic, political or social perspective. His bastard stepchildren, brought up in a coarser age where might makes absolute right, no longer have the intellectual background to make such distinctions. They simply react as a Pavlovian dog: war = good, debate = weakness, loyalty = Godliness.

It did seem that Buckley, later in life, was too much a gentleman to bring the Neanderthals to heel. It must have killed him though, as Sam Tanenhaus is writing, to see the Ann Coulters of the world drape the conservative mantle over their bloodstained fingers.

Perhaps he felt that his passing would mark the end of intellectual conservatism and that, as the old soldier in the Tin Pan Alley tune, he would just fade away. I don’t know. I wished he would have made a stronger condemnation of what the Limbaughs of the world had done to his movement. Perhaps Tanenhaus’ biography will be his final testament.

I’ve thought a lot about Bill Buckley today and I do sadly mourn the kind of debate one could have in America where you could vehemently disagree with someone else while remaining civil and part the best of friends.

Not any more.

Sadly, through the years I have seen conservatives, coming out of business schools, lacking the well-rounded educational credentials, who see the world as anything other than a giant game in which the winners get rich and the losers go home. In fact, many of these people have taken a perverse pride in their evasion of any university core curriculum in which they might have been exposed to the humanities. They wear their ignorance like a badge of honor and ridicule those who have honed their rhetorical skills in actual rhetoric classes.

Not being able to debate on merits or with intellectual skill, the modern conservative has resorted to the tactics of the playground bully and simply believes that shouting your opponent down (ala Bill O’Reilly) is a substitute for victory.

And television, run for the benefit of the business school class, is the perfect medium for this political kabuki theater, as is radio. Their intellectual patron saint, Reagan, made it all possibly by putting a knife into the back of the fairness doctrine and the great progressive sell-out, Bill Clinton, finished the job by allowing the concentration of media ownership in the 1990s.

So what is a liberal to do? You can play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules with conservatives in public media debates and get shouted down or you can drop the civility and fight fire with fire. America, to a certain extent and with the exception of a bright shining moment in the mid 20th century, has generally viewed politics as a blood sport. And so it is again.

After years of seeing progressive viewpoints get shouted down, I am of the opinion that in the present state of discourse in America, what we need are more street fighting liberals and that is one of the main purposes of this blog.

Unfortunately, playing nice in America will get you placed face down in the dirt. And there is too much at state for this nation and the world to play nice. I hate it, but liberals can no longer go into a gunfight armed with a fork. We are no longer facing the Ivy League educated Bill Buckleys of the world, who have exited the stage, but the O’Reillys, Hannities and Coulters who whip up the same kind of mindless hate that fascists have conjured up for centuries.

So I do mourn the passing of William F. Buckley whose magazine I used to enthusiastically read and who, as a gentlemen of his time and his education would always end his letters “cordially.”