White House for Sale

I don't really know if there's an individual American citizen eliglible for the office of President who is actually capable, from the standpoint of education, experience and personal attributes, of leading the nation out of the economic morass into which it has sunk.  The big problem for Barack Obama is the two four-year terms of George W. Bush may have been way too much for the country to survive.  I realize that there are those Bush apologists who will insist, along with Bush himself, that the President was simply an innocent bystander with respect to the various disasters that occurred during his tenure.  For example, Ann Coulter recently attacked those who attack Bush for suggesting that the famous August 2001 PDB actually warned Bush that "Bin Laden was determined to attack within the U.S.," the way the PDB is titled. The leggy political satirist, blond hair flying, argued on her website that the PDB was the sort of thing a grade schooler would pull together from Google cites in a last minute effort to meet a term paper deadline.  

I mentioned recently that conservatives often do a better job of researching original source documents in their arguments as opposed to their liberal counterparts in the commentariat, who often tend to recite simply from memory Bush's Greatest Hits (on the country) without doing the same sort of fact-checking.  Here, however, I think Ms. Coulter's usually fine scholarship betrays her nonetheless, for the PDB does say:

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Now if you stop right there, as Ms. Coulter, flashing exotic lengths of thigh from her little black dress, urges us to do on W's behalf, you must grant her main point, her main point being that she's a bimbo who's figured out how to parlay a cachectic body into many talk show appearances while writing very silly books.  And another point is that, in fact, W did stop right there and did not find out what those FBI reports of "suspicious activity" were, which included field reports about young Arab men learning to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools without bothering with the usual full curriculum, to wit, how to take off and land the damn things.  Now if George W. Bush was a serious man taking a serious job seriously, he would have raised holy hell about those reports.  Where's the follow up?  What's going on?  Who are these guys, and why are they doing this?  Instead, he read the report and then went out on the "ranch" and cut some more brush and went fishing with Barney.

Ann Coulter doesn't mention any of that, and she relies on our laziness in not cross-checking the PDB with the 9/11 Commission Report which reproduces the actual FBI field reports in full, all of which would have been available to our incurious President if he had been, you know, competent.

Anyway, the past is prologue and it's all kind of scary now.  I hate to see these pictures of Barack hanging out with Bush at these friendly lunches, just as I cringed when Nancy Pelosi went for tea at the White House after the Dems took over majority control of the House in 2006.  It's very collegial and all, but it tends to perpetuate business as usual and a reluctance to rock the boat, and rocking the boat till it capsizes is more what we need than "continuity of government," because our government has sucked.

And then Barack starts talking about "reforming" Social Security as part of his grand strategy for dealing with our many financial nightmares.  I understand that "everything must be on the table" when you're facing disaster, but Social Security is fully funded at the present level of benefits through about 2040 if the government grants full faith and credit to the trillions of dollars socked away in its "special issue" Treasury bonds purchased with excess FICA payments over the last 25 years.  So what Barry is actually hinting at is that maybe, just maybe, the government needs to default on its obligations to itself.  If Obama really believes that it's necessary to "reform" Social Security, meaning, of course, to cut benefits rather than to honor these IOUs, then his vaunted desire for "transparency" should also motivate him to announce to foreign creditors holding essentially identical debt instruments, such as China, Saudi Arabia and "Caribbean Island banking centers," that default is now the order of the day.

It's unlikely that Obama will take this second step, especially in light of the report in yesterday's New York Times that China is already pulling back on Treasury purchases in light of its own serious economic problems.  Without a funding source for America's huge deficits, there is simply no way that Obama or the Congressional Clown Troupe can possibly finance a "recovery program" or even the day-to-day operations of the federal government.  And at that point you can pound a For Sale sign in front of Obama's new home.

So man up, O.  Don't pull a Bush and start the shuck and jive crap of your predecessor.  On points like this, it's critical to spell out what the consequences of such "reforms" actually entail, and to describe in detail the embezzlement of FICA money that has been misdirected into the military establishment over the last quarter century.  Otherwise, you're going to slip inexorably into the Beltway conspiracy against the American people.  You promised, after all, to be our President.  We've had eight years of a guy working the other side and we need a change.