Presidents

By Dave Lindorff

So much for economic “green shoots.”

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.

Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.

Send This to Any Newspaper That Uses Cartoons from the Albuquerque Journal

To the Editor:

You ran a cartoon depicting former president Ronald Reagan reducing the federal deficit and President Obama increasing it. The latter might prove true, but is a prediction. The former is simply not true. The national debt, taken as a percentage of gross domestic product, had been declining steadily and rapidly since the end of World War II when Reagan took office and signed budgets with bigger deficits than anyone had previously seen, massively increasing our debt. George H.W. Bush took the practice further, setting new records for deficit spending and debt. During Clinton's presidency the deficit shrank for five years and became a surplus for the last three, reducing our debt. The most dramatic swing in U.S. history came when George W. Bush took office and immediately shifted us from surplus budgets to deficit budgets that dramatically broke his father's record.

Former VP Walter "Fritz" Mondale and President Jimmy Carter made an unprecedented dual appearance on Wolfie Blitzer's Saturation Room. Fritz started things off by (replying to a question?) answering whether he's criticizing the Bush MisAdministration. In doing so he unveiled a revolutionary "new" concept of governance. I'm para-phrasing, transcript below...

[cut to Wolf Blitzer]
Blitzer: Blah, blah, blah (I had just switched the channel and didn't focus in for a second or two...)

[cut to Mondale]
Fritz Mondale: "....we told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace."

[cut to Mondale and Carter] picture shows Mondale with "cat ate the canary" expression and Carter resembling a choirboy with an with angelic halo

[three to five seconds of this shot while Wolfie stammered off-camera]

I laughed so hard I nearly busted my gut... (full transcript below the fold)

We interrupt the Corporatist State Media's Saint Gerald Ford Memorial Beautification Propagandafest for this report from the reality-based community... All right, I've had up to here with this Canonization of Ford by the Corporatist State media. Can we all take a deep breath and contemplate Gerald Ford as a politician, and how his actions belied his bumblin' "regular guy" persona? Well, perhaps a two-by-four up side your head is necessitated... Selected, not elected. Sound familiar?

Heal the nation? I think not. More like the ultimate enabler. Thanks to Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon, the seed of Criminal Republican Rule was thereby fostered and allowed to grow and flourish in a direct timeline from Nixon's criminal enterprise to the present criminal and illegitimate rule of Dear Misleader. Personified by the likes of Nixon WH war criminal Henry Kissinger, and "youngsters" Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld... (more)

Bush turns out to be a fan of pardoning criminal presidents. Ford turns out to have promised to pardon Nixon in order to become president, and to have thought Bush's war was nuts.

The Grand Dame of American Journalism, Helen Thomas, again spoke truth to power in an interview with her niece, Suzanne Geha, of NBC's Grand Rapids station, WOOD-TV. Ms. Thomas, born of Lebanese parents, made a sleeper cameo appearance in the short of President Clinton's final White House days.

Pulling no punches, the ever direct and gracious "Lady Helen" characterized the current Bush administration as the "most secretive" she has reported in her 40 professional years, calling Iraq a "debacle," and leaving the U.S.'s only option to "cakewalk out," a wry and penetrating critique of the fascist PNAC'r Kenneth Adleman's 2002 incendiary bravado that "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk...This President Bush does not need to amass rinky-dink nations as ‘coalition partners' to convince the Washington establishment that we're right."

President Al Gore has been giving rip-roaring speeches to Moveon audiences for two years. On Monday Gore will give another one at the historic Constitution Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington DC. This will be sponsored by the bipartisan Liberty Coalition (of which Democrats.com is a member) and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

John Nichols says the topic will be how Bush has created a "Constitutional crisis" by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties.