More Bush Braying

Watching The Decider's press conference this morning, one can't help but be struck by the.... audacity of the man.

As the headline in the Washington Post records.... "Bush Optimistic About Economy."

Huh?

The economy's great!?.... unless you wanted that job that illegal aliens are now doing, or the one that was shipped abroad.... unless you want affordable health insurance and a worry-free retirement.... unless you want to convert your mortgage or sell your home.... unless you want to take a holiday abroad.... or just to have the comfort of knowing you're life savings and way of life aren't being recklessly gambled away by an ideologically-driven incurious simpleton.

Forget the unsustainable national debt, the unprecedented level of mortgage foreclosures, the 14% unemployment rate of blacks and the U.S. dollar on life-support.... (sing) let's all join hands and skip about, while spending more billions on Iraq's shoot-out.

The president's optimism is more than just disconnected, inexplicably arrogant.... or as the former president of Mexico said of The Decider.... world-class cockiness. He's either a strutting dim-wit or out to destroy our country as we knew it before Bush and his bully boys took over.

How would you classify this maneuver by the White House as reported in Vanity Fair this month in "Billions over Baghdad".... about some billions in cash that went missing in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, the Iraq Coalition Provisional authority received $12 billion in cash from the New York Federal Reserve - that is 363 tons of money.

Well... $9 billion of this cash simply vanished. That's 272 tons of cash!! The job of auditing and disbursing this money was outsourced. To a firm, NorthStar, so small that it's mailing address is a post-office box in Nassau, and it's "office" a split-level home in La Jolla, California.

As former Fed Chairman Greenspan noted in his new book, this is a "dysfunctional" government. He was kind. Isn't it more like a criminally dysfunctional government?

One thing The Decider trumpeted at his news conference that we can readily agree with.... corporate profits "seem to be strong." Oh yes... just ask NorthStar and the "Baghdad billionaires."