Thursday, August 5, 2010

Misty water-color mem'ries

Click image for full Milt Priggee cartoon.

6 comments:

daniel noe said...

Actually, Rush Limbaugh blames Clinton's foreign policy for the rise of Al-Queada. I thought it was a stretch then, and I think it's a stretch now when Nancy Pelosi blames Bush for the economic mess.

lovable liberal said...

"Actually"? As a response to a cartoon?

Of course, if Rush Limbaugh says it, you have to know it's bullshit. Al Qaeda arose out of Carter and then Reagan foreign policy in Afghanistan. Clinton didn't kill Osama bin Laden, and Duhbya ignored the national security briefing of August 2001.

But how is the economic mess not at least partly Duhbya's fault? He broke it, we bought it.

daniel noe said...

I'm not saying Bush is totally blameless, just that it's a stretch to pin this on him. To be fair, anyone that blames Bush for the economic meltdown must also blame Clinton for 9-11 by ignoring the TWA crash, the Cole bombing, for not trying to get Bin Laden hard enough, and for (oops) hitting an aspirin factory in Sudan with missiles. Even Clinton's adultery probably had an effect by making the Muslims angry.

Of course, all this is silly. I don't blame Clinton, but neither do I blame Bush.

Remember, Bush foresaw a problem in having racial minority quotas and took steps to try to stop it back in 2005. If the republicans had really tried to do something instead of sitting on their hands, maybe all this could have been avoided, but since no one knew when or how bad this meltdown would be, I can't really blame them for political expedience.

lovable liberal said...

It's not a stretch at all! Where have you been? This great recession resulted from financial deregulation. Duhbya doesn't get all of the blame - he had plenty of help - but he advocated for the policies that let the financial meltdown happen.

Clinton did not do enough about bin Laden, but he did much, much more about him than Duhbya did until the 9/11 attacks. And his administration briefed Duhbya's incoming neocons, who simply ignored their briefings. They thought the Clintonites were wrongly obsessed with al Qaeda.

What's the deal with you? Have you bought into the big media's culture that calls for accountability only about sex?

daniel noe said...

There was a lot more going on than deregulation - there was also overregulation. More of what I've heard can be found here.

lovable liberal said...

I'll look at that after work, but I expect to find nonsense and bullshit.

Yes, there was more. There was the awful work of the Fed, especially Alan Greenspan, who presided over two bubbles and didn't learn much of anything. As an acolyte of Ayn Rand, his willful failure to see the world as it is, rather than a place where Atlas Shrugged is implausible myth shouldn't be surprising.

Bill Clinton and some Democrats get their share of the blame too. We've had a long course of forgetting the lessons of the Great Depression in headlong flight to allow financial manipulators to make more money than they could ever make doing real and useful work.