IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
NO MORE REPUBLICAN ECONOMIES
Ever since Herbert Hoover, Republicans in power means lousy economies. Hoover mismanaged the economy and the Great Depression came and took hold. In the Nixon era we saw high inflation and stagnating wages. In Reagan's era there were tax cuts and bonanzas for the rich, but most of the rest of us didn't benefit. The lousy economy in 1992 helped defeat George H. W. Bush. Now with Junior in charge things are worse than ever. I hope that George W. Bush will go down with Herbert Hoover in the memory of Americans of just how rotten things get with these trickle down, give-everything-to-the-rich, thugs in charge. This commentary by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:
What’s really remarkable about this dismal outlook is that the economy isn’t (yet?) in recession, and consumers haven’t yet felt the full effects of $98 oil (wait until they see this winter’s heating bills) or the plunging dollar, which will raise the prices of imported goods.
The response of those who support the Bush administration’s economic policies is to complain about the unfairness of it all. They rattle off statistics that supposedly show how wonderful the economy really is. Many of these statistics are misleading or irrelevant, but it’s true that the official unemployment rate is fairly low by historical standards. So why are people so unhappy?
The answer from Bush supporters — who are, on this and other matters, a strikingly whiny bunch — is to blame the "liberal media" for failing to report the good news. But the real explanation for the public’s pessimism is that whatever good economic news there is hasn’t translated into gains for most working Americans.
One way to drive this point home is to compare the situation for workers today with that in the late 1990s, when the country’s economic optimism was almost as remarkable as its pessimism today. For example, in the fall of 1998 almost two-thirds of Americans thought the economy was excellent or good.
THE ALLEGED "LIBERAL MEDIA"
With right-wingers it's a Pavlovian response. "Liberal media" pops out of their mouths instantly if there's something in the news they don't like. If the media are scourging Democrats or liberals, right-wingers don't have a problem. But have a report about racism, economic inequality, Republican corruption, or global climate change and immediately it's the "liberal media." If there is any conclusive proof the media aren't liberal, look at the Scott McClellan revelations about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. It's gotten virtually
no attention from the "liberal media," but we've heard about Natalie Halloway all over again. This article by Dave Zweifel is at www.commondreams.org:A sneak peek at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that virtually every bigwig in the Bush administration passed along lies about who was involved in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame — including the president himself.
McClellan in 2003 stood at the White House press room podium and said that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby, the two most senior aides to George Bush and Dick Cheney, had anything to do with leaking to several members of the press that Plame was an undercover CIA agent. She was exposed in an apparent retaliation for a guest column her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written for the New York Times, claiming that Bush had lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address.
As it later turned out, not only was Bush’s speech a lie, but McClellan’s defense of Rove and Libby was also an outright lie. McClellan’s memoir, to be published next spring, claims that five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in his telling that lie to the press and the rest of the nation: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.
But the McClellan excerpts got little play last week in our so-called anti-George Bush liberal media.
