An ancient Chinese curse is "May you live in interesting times." My, do we. I missed W’s scintillating press conference [today], which I understand was noteworthy in its degree of separation from reality, even for our esteemed leader.
Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, in testimony before Congress today, acknowledged the overall weakness of the U. S. economy, with surging energy costs, an extraordinarily weak housing market, and very tight consumer credit, coupled with ramped-up inflation that may well result in an increase in interest rates at the next meeting of the Federal Reserve Board in August.
If that weren’t bad enough by itself, consider again the $12 billion a month we are spending on the war in Iraq, plus the increasing apparent need to significantly increase our troop strength in Afghanistan, where violence against the American contingent there is escalating beyond what it now is in Iraq, together with the ongoing sucking sound of our trade deficits with China, the Middle East, and Europe, and it becomes obvious to even a casual observer of our situation that things are dire indeed, with no immediate hope of improvement.
Consider also the areas of energy and the environment/global warming. The Administration’s standard response to spiraling upward energy costs is to drill for oil, in the Arctic and off our shores, and that will solve everything, and reduce our dependency on foreign petroleum, with little or no mention of pursuing alternative energy sources. With respect to the environment, our fearless leader, despite having flatly denied the existence of global warming for the majority of his presidency, now, at a summit on global warming, made a non-binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions (the scientifically-determined primary basis for global warming) by the year 2050. Woo-hoo.
I remember when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980. His mantra was, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Well, considering the fact that President Bush II has been in office for nearly eight years now, it is appropriate to ask that same question on an eight-year scale.
Bill Clinton turned over an economy to George Bush that had a budget surplus of some $400 million. Between the massive tax cuts that he was able to ram through an obedient Republican Congress, which itself wound up breaking all records for "pork" bills (now infamously known as "earmarks," we have a greater than $300 billion annual deficit. Time was when the first law of conservative thinking was that the government budget, at every level, must balance. The Republicans have long lambasted the Democrats as being a "tax and spend" party. Well, the Republicans can rightly be labeled as the "don’t tax, but go ahead and spend" party. Which means unprecedented (and utterly unjustified) budget deficits and ensuring that the next generation of Americans will have to clean up the economic mess left by this one. If they can.
A poll released today indicated that only 16 to 17% of Americans think that overall, our country is on the right track. The specific approval ratings for President Bush were 28% overall, with 4% of Democrats, 12% of independents, and 63% of Republicans approving of his job performance. Of those who described themselves as conservative, Bush’s approval rating was 46%.
When our country was sneak-attacked on 9/11, virtually the entire nation rallied around President Bush to respond to the threat and protect us. The initial response (attacking Afghanistan) started out well, but was mishandled when Osama bin Laden and the rest of the leadership of al Qaeda were allowed to slip through our hands into the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they have remained unmolested, to regain strength comparable to what they had prior to 9/11. This is primarily as a result of the diversion of American forces from the real battleground in Afghanistan to the phony, manufactured, unnecessary war in Iraq. When and if the next major attack against our country comes, it will in all likelihood again come from al Qaeda -- which we had the chance to crush, but chose not to.
The title of this piece comes from a 1963 Bob Dylan song, "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall." I believe that Dylan was speaking of the spectre of nuclear war, racism, and pollution. Well, we may have staved off the rain for longer than Mr. Dylan envisioned, but it appears to this writer that our chickens are about to come home to roost. And no, they aren’t the bluebirds of happiness.