Minor corrections to commenters:
Bush went to Yale, not Harvard;
Paulson (Bernanke, too) is a Dem, not a Pub. Bush bought into all this PC crap (reaching across the aisle, hiring minorities, etc);
Pubs did it, too! (So, that makes it okay.) Um, no.
The flaw in the article is that the writer never countered the obvious rebuttals ahead of time. Yes, much of this happened under Bush. During the transition, Bush and Obama worked very closely on this. Obama stayed out of foreign affairs, and Bush said almost nothing on domestic stuff, while Obama opined regularly. It’s no coincidence that Obama kept Paulson and others. They were Dems and already in place, implementing Dem ideas and policies.
There is a meme proffered by every politician. “I don’t have to be an expert. I can surround myself with experts, listen to their advice, and come to the right decision.” Bull! This is a case in point. When the feces hits the fan, the pol starts flailing. He runs to his in-house expert, and simply does whatever the expert tells him to do.
AIG did the same thing. The head honchos trusted their financial services guy to run that area sans oversight, because they refused to bother to learn about the field before jumping in with both feet. That’s what brought them down.
In contrast, the main reason our military is so effective is that the higher you go, the more education you find. The top guys know how to do the jobs of their subordinates. Just about all the Generals have doctorates in MilSci and training in other fields.
What Bush should have done is convene a council of top economists (preferably conservative) and ask them what to do. He failed to do so, and the in-house Dems (bankers all) colluded with their cohorts in the investment banks and in AIG to loot the Treasury. The looting continues unabated. The barbarians are over the wall, and Rome is being pillaged and burned.
One need not destroy an enemy’s army to bring down a nation. That’s just one way. A surer way is to destroy its currency. It might not bring them down, but will, at least, make them irrelevant. When America is no longer exceptional, then the ideal of America dies, and the world is doomed to hopelessness.
Obama’s printing up another trillion dollars, and trillions are being funnelled by the Fed to other countries. They are carrying off our wealth, and destroying our currency. The only hope now is that it will take them too long. They’ll get drunk in excess, and the citizens can rise up against them and take it all back.
