More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

Who destroyed the economy in 2008?  Democrats say it was Bush.  Why?  Well, because he was president, that’s why.

Why – when applying the same logic – Barack Obama STILL isn’t responsible for any of his economic mess fully two years after George W. Bush left office is anybody’s guess.

But stop and think.  The primary cause for the 2008 economic meltdown was a downturn in the housing market and the underlying mortgage market.

At the core of that meltdown was GSEs (that’s “Government Sponsored Enterprises” to you) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has always been that it was – and remains – a social welfare institution masquerading as a financial institution.  And they have made beyond-godawful “financial” decisions because their true loyalty has always been with socialist policies rather than financial ones.

Let’s look at Fannie and Freddie’s current picture:

Fannie, Freddie’s $685B fix
Bloomberg
Last Updated: 11:54 PM, November 4, 2010
Posted: 11:54 PM, November 4, 2010

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage firms operating under federal conservatorship, may cost taxpayers as much as $685 billion as the US covers losses and overhauls the housing-finance system, Standard & Poor’s said.

Costs for resolving the two government-sponsored entities could reach $280 billion, including $148 billion already delivered under a US Treasury Department promise of unlimited support, New York-based S&P said yesterday in a research report. The government may spend an additional $405 billion to capitalize a replacement for the two companies, which own or insure more than half the US mortgage market.

“It appears unlikely in our view that housing and mortgage markets will be able to operate normally without continuing and substantial government involvement,” S&P said, citing the GSEs’ growing portfolio of unsold homes, a sluggish economy, high unemployment, the prospect of rising foreclosures and billions in legacy losses.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has said there is a strong case to be made for continued US involvement, has promised to deliver the Obama administration’s plan to overhaul the housing-finance system by the end of January. Republican lawmakers, who will take control of the House of Representatives in January, have called for the government to end its support for Washington-based Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of McLean, Va.

“Although federal authorities have taken no concrete public steps toward sponsoring a GSE alternative, Standard & Poor’s believes that it’s a useful exercise to consider how much such a recapitalization might cost taxpayers,” the report said.

$685 BILLION.  That’s quite a mess.

Did it just happen?  Hardly.  This was going on for years.  This was what caused the subprime crisis that destroyed our economy in 2008.

Let’s survey the record.  According to record provided by The New York Times, Fannie and Freddie were in huge trouble PRIOR TO the economic collapse.  And their holdings were so massive that there is simply no reasonable way that one can maintain that their crisis didn’t directly contribute to the greater crisis to be revealed.  Read the article dated July 11, 2008:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

A timeline of the subprime loan crisis of 2008 clearly reveals that it was Fannie Mae’s collapse that started the entire mess rolling downhill.  From Wikipedia:

September 2008

Main article: Global financial crisis in September 2008

• • September 7: Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which at that point owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.’s $12 trillion mortgage market, effectively nationalizing them. This causes panic because almost every home mortgage lender and Wall Street bank relied on them to facilitate the mortgage market and investors worldwide owned $5.2 trillion of debt securities backed by them.^[151][152]
  • September 14: Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America amidst fears of a liquidity crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse^[153]
  • September 15: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection^[154]
  • September 16: Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s downgrade ratings on AIG‘s credit on concerns over continuing losses to mortgage-backed securities, sending the company into fears of insolvency.^[155][156] In addition, the Reserve Primary Fund “breaks the buck” leading to a run on the money market funds. Over $140 billion is withdrawn vs. $7 billion the week prior. This leads to problems for the commercial paper market, a key source of funding for corporations, which suddenly could not get funds or had to pay much higher interest rates.^[157]
  • September 17: The US Federal Reserve lends $85 billion to American International Group (AIG) to avoid bankruptcy.
  • September 18: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke meet with key legislators to propose a $700 billion emergency bailout through the purchase of toxic assets. Bernanke tells them: “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.”^[158]
  • September 19: Paulson financial rescue plan is unveiled after a volatile week in stock and debt markets.

Democrats who bother to offer any reason at all why “Republicans got us into this mess” claim that the Republicans refused to regulate and reform the economic sector.

Well, let’s dig a little further.  Was it George Bush who refused to regulate or reform?

Hardly.

From US News & World Report:

Seventeen. That’s how many times, according to this White House statement (hat tip Gateway Pundit), that the Bush administration has called for tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That’s right.  George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to reform and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agencies at the epicenter of the economic crisis.

When did this thing start?  Under Bush?  Not according to The New York Times, as I have pointed out before in a previous article.

From the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

More.  Again from the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

What do we have, even in the pages of the New York Times?  A prediction that as soon as the economy cooled off, the mortgage market would explode like a depth charge and the government would have to step in to prevent a catastrophe.  And from a Clinton program, at that.

The same man – Peter Wallison – who had predicted the disaster from 1999 wrote a September 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”

So this disaster began under Bill Clinton.  Specifically, it began in the very final years of the Clinton administration.  Interestingly, at the same time that the Dot-com bubble was getting ready to explode on Clinton’s watch.  Clinton got all the credit for a great economy, and Bush got to watch 78% of the value of Nasdaq destroyed just as he was taking office.  $7.1 TRILLION in wealth was vaporized (43% of the the Market Capitalization of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Full Cap between 2000 Q1 and Q1 2003).  Bill Clinton handed George Bush a massive economic disaster (made even worse by the shocking 9/11 attacks), and Bush turned economic calamity into the longest consecutive period of job growth (52 straight months) in history.  In diametrical contradiction to all the lies that you have  heard from Democrats and from a mainstream media propaganda machine that often puts Joseph Goebbels to shame

What did George W. Bush do to deal with the necessary regulation and reform of these government-subsidized behemoths Fannie and Freddie?

Read what the New York Times said back in September 11, 2003:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

So Bush WANTED to regulate and reform the industry that would destroy the economy five years later, again, in contradiction to a blatantly dishonest and ideologically liberal and biased media.  Bush didn’t “refuse to regulate.”  Bush TRIED to provide the necessary regulatory steps that could have averted disaster.

And who blocked those regulations and reforms that Bush tried to provide?  None other than Barney Frank and his Democrat buddies:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

Democrats blocked reform and regulation of Fannie and Freddie.  They threatened to filibuster any attempt at regulation and reform.  Meanwhile John McCain wrote a letter in 2006 urging reform and regulation of the GSEs.  He said:

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

And it came to pass exactly as John McCain warned.

Because of Democrats.  Who were virtually entirely to blame for the disaster that ensued as a result of their blocking of reform and regulation.

What did Democrats do with the mainstream media’s culpability?  They falsely dropped the crisis at the feet of “greedy” Wall Street.  But while examples of Wall Street greed abound, the liberal intelligentsia deliberately overlooked the central and preceding role of Democrat-dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here’s how the mess actually happened:

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, in their role as Government Sponsored Enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again, are Government Sponsored Enterprises.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, any intelligent observer should note a primary conflict that amounts to a fundamental hypocritical contradiction: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet at the same time they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what allowed the toxic instruments that have been sold across the world to proliferate.  And then to explode.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

And it was Democrats, not Bush, and not Republicans, who were all over this disaster that destroyed our economy in 2008.

We were led by a pathologically dishonest media to believe that Republicans had created this mess, when it fact it had been Democrats.  And so we gave the very fools who destroyed our economy total power.

And what have they done in the two years since?

They made bad far, far worse.

Scared Democrats Admit Bush Was Right On Tax Cutting Policy

More and more Democrats are admitting that increasing taxes on the rich people who actually create jobs would be a foolhardy thing to do.

That pours a big giant can of water on the fire Democrats started in the whole blame-Bush-for-the-economic-meltdown thing.  Bush’s tax cuts were the biggest straw man for Democrats.  And now some of the most prominent Democrats are saying we need to keep those same tax cuts that Democrats were universally demonizing only months ago.

More Dems buck plan to let taxes increase for rich
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP) – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON — Congress seems increasingly reluctant to let taxes go up, even on wealthier Americans.

Worried about the fragile economy and their own upcoming elections, a growing number of Democrats are joining the rock-solid Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s plans to let some of the Bush administration’s tax cuts expire.

Democratic leaders in Congress still back Obama, but the willingness to raise taxes is waning among the rank and file as the stagnant economy threatens the party’s majority in the House and Senate.

“In my view this is no time to do anything that could be jarring to a fragile recovery,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, a first-term Democrat. […]

“It’s going to be hard to resist a one-year extension for everybody, given the state of the economy,” said Clint Stretch, a tax expert at the consulting firm Deloitte Tax LLP. “That’s where I think the ball is moving.”

The tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush. They provided help for both rich and poor, reducing the lowest marginal rates as well as the top ones and several in between. They also provided a wide range of income tax breaks for education, families with children and married couples.

Taxes on capital gains and dividends were reduced, while the federal estate tax was gradually repealed, though only through this year. […]

Another freshman Democrat, Rep. Bobby Bright of Alabama, said he would like to see all the tax cuts extended for two or three years, if lawmakers cannot agree on a more permanent plan.

“Party leaders are not my directors or my boss,” Bright said. “My boss is my constituents, and I’ve heard from a vast majority of my constituents that they don’t believe in tax increases on anybody at this point in time.”

Bright is high on the re-election endangered list, one of roughly four dozen Democrats in districts won by Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008.

In the Senate, where Democrats need unity and at least one Republican vote to overcome filibusters, at least three Democrats and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have said they want to extend all the tax cuts temporarily.

Several Democratic candidates for Senate have also come out in favor of extending them all, including Robin Carnahan in Missouri and Jack Conway in Kentucky.

“Jack Conway was in favor of the Bush tax cuts when they first passed (in 2001 and 2003), and he’s in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts now,” said spokeswoman Allison Haley.

An article in McClatchey Newspapers points out that if Democrats try to hike taxes on the rich, it will be Democrats who stood in the way:

Democrats unlikely to repeal tax cuts for the rich
By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Democrats in Congress are poised to play a leading role this month in thwarting their party’s effort to raise income tax rates on the wealthy.

Tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 expire at the end of this year. President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders have been eager to extend the breaks for individuals who earn less than $200,000 annually and joint filers who make less than $250,000. Those who earn more would pay higher, pre-2001 rates starting next year.

However, a small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich. Many face electorates that recoil at the mention of any tax increase. Some represent areas that are loaded with wealthier taxpayers. Further, some incumbent senators who don’t face voters this fall are reluctant to increase taxes on anyone while the economy remains sluggish.

Without their support, the push to raise rates on the rich probably will fail. […]

Many Democrats and Republicans are eager for a tax cut battle, seeing it as emblematic of each party’s economic principles.

“Now the administration is calling for a massive tax hike on small businesses in the middle of a recession,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who maintains that higher rates on the wealthy would hit small business hard, a point the Obama administration disputes.

“So it’s no surprise,” McConnell added, “that most Americans think the country is on the wrong track and that Democrat policies have failed to do anything to fix their top concern, the economy.”

Democratic leaders are convinced that voters won’t buy that argument. Not only will the public back higher taxes for the rich, but “we have an opportunity to generate $700 billion that could go to deficit reduction and badly needed programs,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., a co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus.

The middle class-only extension is thought to have strong support in the House, where Democrats have a huge majority, but some Democrats are reluctant.

Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., represents the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, one of the nation’s wealthiest districts. Median family income there in 2008 was $117,892, well above the national average of $63,211. He said that repealing the top rates would have political consequences.

“Sometimes we forget how we became the majority. We did it by winning some affluent districts,” he said.

The bigger problem for Democrats looms in the Senate, where Majority Leader Reid’s immediate problem is getting the 60 votes needed to cut off debate on the measure. Democrats control 59 seats, and at least three of them — Bayh, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — have signaled that they won’t back a permanent repeal of the tax cuts for the wealthy.

They suggest a way out of a stalemate — temporarily extending all the expiring tax rates — but so far the leadership isn’t going along.

Sean Neary, a spokesman for Senate Budget Committee Chairman Conrad, said the senator backed such an extension “for now.”

“The general rule of thumb is that you do not raise taxes or cut spending during an economic downturn. That would be counterproductive,” Conrad said.

Nelson also offered what’s become the centrist Democratic mantra. He, too, said he’d back extending the tax breaks for the wealthy “for at least a period of time because raising taxes in a weak economy could impair recovery.”

That stand could be even more popular with Democratic candidates for the Senate who aren’t incumbents. The hottest races are in conservative states, such as Kentucky, where Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway are battling for the seat now held by Republican Sen. Jim Bunning.

Of the expiring tax cuts for the wealthy, Conway spokeswoman Allison Haley said that he “believes we should extend them now, especially when so many Kentucky families and small businesses are struggling under this recession.”

In Missouri, Republican U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt and Democrat Robin Carnahan are in a tight race. Despite a welcoming embrace with Obama at a Kansas City fundraiser in July, Carnahan said last week that she wanted to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone.

“Now is not the time to raise taxes,” she said.

In Indiana, U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Ind., who’s seeking to replace Bayh, told the Evansville Courier & Press this summer that all the Bush-era tax cuts should become permanent.

That position makes sense, said Brian Vargus, a professor of political science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, because Indiana is “an overwhelmingly Republican state … and there is never support for taxes or public goods.”

So from this article we see the term “moderate.”  And the moderates are those Democrats who see a compromise to the looming war over tax cuts: keep them all for now.  Don’t hike taxes on the only economic class of Americans who have the wherewithal to actually create jobs.  Keep the the tax cuts for at least a year, if not 2-3 years.  But the hard-liner Democrats are willing to see the tax cuts end for EVERYONE in order to maintain their Marxist class warfare principle of punishing the rich for being successful.

Democrats offered two reasons in their unrelenting demagoguery of George Bush: 1) they said the tax cuts caused the economic disaster; and 2) they said Bush’s refusal to regulate caused the economic disaster.

But 1) is now blown apart, given DEMOCRATS’ current acknowledgment that the Bush tax cuts – yes, even for the rich – weren’t the bogey man Democrats have been saying.

And 2) suffers from the flaw that Bush DID try to regulate the entity most responsible for the meltdown that befell the economy in 2008, and the ONLY reason that entity was not reformed and regulated was because DEMOCRATS blocked Bush at every turn.

That entity was the Government Sponsored Enterprise, or GSE, commonly known by the brand names of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was Fannie and Freddie that expanded and ultimately exploded using dangerous subprime loans (see also here).  It was also Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who bundled thousands of bad and good mortgages together into instruments called “mortgage backed securities” and sold them to the private sector.  And when no one could separate the good from the bad, uncertainty paralyzed the banking system and led to the crash.

A brief history of the mortgage meltdown reveals how it was the GSEs acting under Democrat policies that created the housing bubble – (and even Obama economic shill Christina Romer admits “the popping of the housing bubble had serious consequences” which “destroyed $13 trillion of wealth in 2008”) – and the corresponding mortgage crisis which imploded our economy:

In 1999, under pressure from the Clinton administration, Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest home mortgage underwriter, relaxed credit requirements on the loans it would purchase from other banks and lenders, hoping that easing these restrictions would result in increased loan availability for minority and low-income buyers. Putting pressure on the GSE’s (Government Sponsored Enterprise) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Clinton administration looked to increase their sub-prime portfolios, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development expressing its interest in the GSE’s maintaining a 50% portion of their portfolios in loans to low and moderate-income borrowers.^[10]

As noted, subprime mortgages sky-rocketed during the initial era of loosening of terms throughout the 1990’s. From a low of 5% of mortgages in 1994, to 14% in 1997, to 23% in 2005, subprime mortgages continued to boom in the early 2000’s. Following the 2004 initiative policy change spearheaded by a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decision to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow upwards of 30 times their capital, subprimes became an even greater investment vehicle for investment banks and institutions in the U.S. and around the world. Since 1994, the securitization rate of subprime loans has increased from approximately 32 percent to nearly 78 percent of total subprime originations.^[11] This further exposed the financial community to the effects of the coming housing bubble.

Democrat policies created the housing bubble that Christina Romer acknowledges was the cause of the destruction of the US economy.

And the refusal of Democrats to reform and regulate Fannie and Freddie exploded that bubble.

Bush warned SEVENTEEN TIMES that we needed to reform Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae or have an economic disaster on our hands.  John McCain urged action to avert an economic disaster.  And Democrats refused to budge to deal with the monster they created.

Again, Bush was right.  Democrats were profoundly wrong.

The mainstream media propagandists refused to report the truth.  They kept broadcasting a lie, and naive and frankly stupid Americans rewarded the Democrats who created the economic disaster with total power.

And we’ve been paying for that stupidity for the last two years.

As of today, Obama is at a dismal 42% approval, and in danger of plunging into the 30s.  45% of Americans now strongly disapprove of Obama, versus only 24% who still strongly approve of the job he’s doing “fundamentally transforming” our economy into a pre-industrial barter system.

Obama is in full meltdown mode as all of his campaign rhetoric is being revealed for the lies it always was:

And Democrats are deservedly going to meltdown right along with him.

This ‘Blame Bush’ Crap Has Just GOT To End

Are you sick of Obama and the left unrelentingly blaming Bush for everything that is happening going on two years after he left office?  Do you think that Obama will ever man-up and actually become responsible for his presidency?

Me too, and me neither, respectively.

I went more than a little off on a liberal who dredged up this demagogic rhetorical garbage:

2010/08/20 at 8:24 pm

In Europe people laugh at us leaving in false dreams, wall streets spending false money, Bush starting a false war etc.

America is the land of dreams, how come? Idiots like George Bush can get elected to president. If he can Become president, then what can the smart people do? Jump to pluto?.

Do you really expect Obama to fix the worst recession in 80 years in a bit more than 18 months? Which was created by 8 years of Reagan, 4 years by bush, Clinton’s last period and 8 years by Bush? What is he some kind of god?

I didn’t vote for Obama but I expect him to put us in the right direction in this 6 years (he most likely) has left. in 2007-2008 they estimated that the recession will peak in 2012, so there is still a lot left. Just imagine how it would be with Palin/McCain. McCain who wanted to keep Bush’s politics moving and Palin who thought Africa was a country.

Here was my response:

First of all, I must pause to mock you for making Europe the gold standard of measurement. I guess if you like Nazism, fascism, Marxism, socialism, and genocide up the wazoo, Europe must be the coolest place on earth.  I can see why you lefties love it so much.

What was it that Jefferson said? “The comparison of our governments with those of Europe, is like a comparison of heaven and hell.” Not that you give a damn what Jefferson said about anything.

Let me assure you that the Iraq War – which 60% of Democrat Senators voted to authorize (just for the record) – was a REAL war indeed.

Here’s a record of how Democrats were for that war before they were against it:

Truth or Fiction
Freedom Agenda
Snopes

And at least Bush had the decency to actually WIN his war. Barack Obama demonized the Iraq War and demonized the surge strategy that enabled us to win it. And Obama made Afghanistan “his war” in order to maintain the facade that he really wasn’t a weakling on foreign policy.  Bush did so well in Iraq that the Obama administration actually tried to take credit for the victory. And now we’re “floundering in Afghanistan” under Obama’s failed leadership.

That Sarah Palin who thought Africa was a country thing? False, you demagogue. It was a made-up “fact” that was reported as truth. And the ONLY documented “source” behind it has been revealed to be a hoax.

Now, you want to see a REAL idiot in action? How about a guy running for president who thinks there are 58 states? This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant he doesn’t even know jack squat about his own country.

Youtube:

Quote:

“It is wonderful to be back in Oregon,” Obama said. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”

So let’s talk about what a total and absolute ideologue you are to condemn Sarah Palin for a bogus fabricated quote that she didn’t even say, and to then defend a guy who is on video saying something about 20 times as stupid.  Because that’s how the Democrat Party operates, in a nutshell.

For the factual record, Obama actually called Europe a country.  How is that not just as stupid as calling Africa a country?

Youtube:

Quote:

“One of the things that is a huge advantage for America compared to countries like Europe is, actually, we’re constantly replenishing ourselves with hungry, driven people who are coming here, and they want to work, and they start a business, and our population is younger and more dynamic, and that’s a good thing!”

Which is to say that Obama is unfit to be president by your own deceitful example.

And as for Bush being an idiot, at least he didn’t need a pair of damn teleprompters to say his name right. Maybe Bush would have sounded more “intelligent” to you if he read absolutely everything he said at every venue he went to off his teleprompters.

Here’s Obama without his teleprompter for one minute:

Which is why he needs to bring one everywhere – even to sixth grade classrooms – to not sound like the gibbering idiot he truly is.

So, oh, yeah, the country is much better off with its “Genius-in-chief,” isn’t it?

You don’t give one damn about the truth; you live in your own self-created reality in which Sarah Palin is stupid for something that she never said, while Barack Obama who said something stupider than Sarah Palin ever said in her life is still brilliant.

You would be completely ashamed of yourself, if you were capable of that attribute of moral character.

I write an article that shows how BY THE DEMOCRATS VERY OWN STANDARD OF MEASUREMENT Obama is the worst president in American history. And you’ve got nothing to say about that. Nothing but more “blame Bush.”

Another demonstration of your rabid leftist ideology that will NOT be fair: the economy goes into an absolute TOILET under Obama, but he’s not responsible for any of his policies.

The unemployment rate was 7.6% when Bush left office. But Obama is not responsible for the fact that it’s near 10% now and by most expert accounts will rise higher after he pissed away $862 billion (actually $3.27 TRILLION) in his boondoggle “stimulus”???

Why is it that you refuse to hold Obama to any kind of standard at all – even the standard he set for himself? The Obama administration said this was a terrible economy, but he had the solution, that his stimulus would keep unemployment from going over 8%. And by his own administration’s standard did he not utterly fail? Wasn’t he elected to make the economy better, instead of far worse?

And what do we say about the fact that unemployment is going up, rather than down?  Wasn’t Obama supposed to make things better rather than worse?

Jobless claims rise to highest level in 9 months
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Economics Writer – Thu Aug 19, 2010

WASHINGTON – Employers appear to be laying off workers again as the economic recovery weakens. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits reached the half-million mark last week for the first time since November.

It was the third straight week that first-time jobless claims rose. The upward trend suggests the private sector may report a net loss of jobs in August for the first time this year.

Initial claims rose by 12,000 last week to 500,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.

Construction firms are letting go of more workers as the housing sector slumps and federal stimulus spending on public works projects winds down. State and local governments are also cutting jobs to close large budget gaps.

The layoffs add to growing fears that the economic recovery is slowing and the country could slip back into a recession.

Isn’t Obama kind of going the wrong way, Mr. “Blame Bush”???

We’ve got all kinds of measures showing that things are far worse than they ever were under Bush. But you, total rabid fundamentalist leftist ideologue that you are – can only shout “blame Bush!” all the louder.

Here’s one example from August 21, 2010 in the LA Times:

With consumers and businesses keeping a lid on expenses, more and more small and mid-size restaurants are throwing in their dish towels and closing up shop. […]

Nationwide, the number of restaurants dropped in 2010 for the first time in more than a decade, according to NPD, falling 5,202 to 579,416.

So, wow. That means that things haven’t been this bad since Bill Clinton was president and the Dot-com bubble he created blew up. That means that things were NEVER this bad under George Bush.

Bush inherited a terrible economic situation, too. First of all, the Dot-com bubble that Clinton passed to Bush created huge economic upheaval – to the tune of Nasdaq losing 78% of its value. Trillions of dollars of Clinton economic growth were just blown away like a fart in a hurricane.  The mainstream media didn’t report the facts of Clinton’s recession because they are shockingly biased liberal propagandists. Which is why so few Americans trust them anymore. Clinton took all the credit for the Dot-com build-up; Bush got all the pain when it blew up, suffering a huge recession that was all on Clinton’s tab. Then you add to that the 9/11 attack, which crippled the airline and tourism industry for months, and you should understand how bad Bush had it. But he didn’t blame Clinton a gazillion times; he manned up and solved the problem. He took an economic lemon and made 52 consecutive months of job growth.   In contrast, Obama hasn’t solved anything. All he’s done is blame and demonize.

Here’s another one from the August 21 2010 Associated Press report:

In the wake of news about a spike in new applications for unemployment benefits comes another potentially troubling sign: A record number of workers made hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter.

What’s more, the number of workers borrowing from their accounts reached a 10-year high, according to a report issued Friday by Fidelity Investments.

Wow. Again, things haven’t been so bad since the last time a Democrat was president. Again, it was NEVER this bad under George Bush’s presidency.

How about trade deficit figures? From November 19 2009 Reuters:

WASHINGTON: The US trade deficit widened in September by an unexpectedly large 18.2 per cent, the most in more than 10 years, as oil prices rose for the seventh straight month and imports from China bounded higher, a US government report showed on Friday.

Hey, again, things weren’t so bad since a Democrat president last ran things. And it was never so bad under George Bush.

How about all the foreclosures? Surely Obama has made that better? Oops. Again, things were NEVER this bad under Bush’s presidency:

US foreclosures up 4%; top 300000 for 17th month on the trot
by Jaspreet Virk – August 12, 2010

Foreclosure crisis doesn’t seem to be loosening its hold on the housing sector. After declining for the last three consecutive months, foreclosure activity is back up in the United States.

As per the ‘Foreclosure Market Report’ released by RealtyTrac, an online marketplace, giving insights into foreclosures, 325,229 houses received foreclosure filings in the nation, 4 percent up from June.

Not only there has been a jump in the number of houses receiving filings, the foreclosures have exceeded 300000 for the 17th straight month. One in every 397 houses received foreclosure notice from the lenders in July.

Hmmm. Obama’s been president for all of those 17 months. And Bush was president for none of them. But it’s all Bush’s fault, anyway, isn’t it? At least if you’re a hypocrite liberal, it is.

Under Obama, and ONLY under Obama, foreclosures are up 75% in the major metropolitan areas:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Foreclosures rose in 3 of every four large U.S. metro areas in this year’s first half, likely ruling out sustained home price gains until 2013, real estate data company RealtyTrac said on Thursday [in its midyear 2010 metropolitan foreclosure report].

Unemployment was the main culprit driving foreclosure actions on more than 1.6 million properties, the company said.

“We’re not going to see meaningful, sustainable home price appreciation while we’re seeing 75 percent of the markets have increases in foreclosures,” RealtyTrac senior vice president Rick Sharga said in an interview.

Has Obama done anything to solve this problem – which was why our economy blew up in the first place? Absolutely not.

Obama failed – because he is a failure, and failing is what he does:

WASHINGTON – Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.

The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday’s report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say.

More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. Economists expect the number of foreclosures to grow well into next year.

“The government program as currently structured is petering out. It is taking in fewer homeowners, more are dropping out and fewer people are ending up in permanent modifications,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

There’s “hope and change” for you.  A failed president with failed policies.

As an update (August 24), I add the following headline:

Instant View: Existing home sales plunge to 15-year low
Tue Aug 24, 10:28 am ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sales of previously owned U.S. homes dropped in July to their lowest pace in 15 years, implying further loss of momentum in the economic recovery.

Existing home sales dropped by a massive 27% in July.  And, again, omigosh.  We haven’t seen terrible numbers like this since the last time a Democrat was president.  We NEVER saw anything like this during the Bush era.

How about budget deficits? Bush never had a trillion dollar deficit in his entire presidency, and the Democrats still blamed him for his spending; but the CBO now says that Obama will run a trillion-plus dollar defict next year, making it three years in a row. And we will have massive trillion-plus dollar deficits for as long as the eye can see because of Obama’s reckless unsustainable spending programs and the debt they will create. How about this? Obama’s deficit for July alone was more than Bush’s entire 2007-year deficit! And how about this one? Obama outspent Bush’s entire eight-year presidency’s deficit in just 20 months – after demonizing Bush for his spending!!!

From The Wall Street Journal, which, unlike the New York Slimes, the LA Slimes, the Chicago Tribune, and other major liberal papers, ISN’T actually financially and morally bankrupt:

Mr. Obama cannot dismiss critics by pointing to President George W. Bush’s decision to run $2.9 trillion in deficits while fighting two wars and dealing with 9/11 and Katrina. Mr. Obama will surpass Mr. Bush’s eight-year total in his first 20 months and 11 days in office, adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt. If America “cannot and will not sustain” deficits like Mr. Bush’s, as Mr. Obama said during the campaign, how can Mr. Obama sustain the geometrically larger ones he’s flogging?

Bush’s deficits were 2-3% of GDP.  Obama’s are at 12.8% of GDP – which is five to six times higher and bringing us closer and closer every day to the point of collapse.

Are the people better off under Obama than they were under Bush? I don’t think so:

More Americans are on food stamps now under Barack Obama’s failed presidency than at any time in history. And that certainly includes George Bush’s presidency.

But now Obama and the Democrats are going to raid the Food Stamp program to pay for their pet liberal projects. Because “Let them eat cake.”

How about bank failures? We kind of need banks for a healthy economy unless we want to go back to the barter system, you know:

Banks are failing at double the rate of last year.  During 2009, which the government claims was the peak of the recession, the total number of bank failures at this point in the year was 40.  It is already 83 for this year.

For the record, only 25 banks failed under Bush in 2008.  That number soared to 140 banks under Obama’s watch in 2009.  And now we’re already past 118 bank failures this year in 2010 with four more months to go.

But you can’t hold Barack Obama responsible for the fact that things are far, far, FAR worse under his presidency than they ever were under Bush’s. The ONLY reason you’ve got to “blame Bush” is that the 2008 economic meltdown happened under Bush’s presidency. You don’t even offer an actual reason or state an actual policy reason for the failure; you just blame Bush because he was there.  You don’t consider the fact that things were great until Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate in 2006 and royally screwed up the country (the unemployment rate before Democrats took over Congress in January 2007 was 4.6%).  Nope. Bush was president in 2008, so it was all his fault. Even though he warned SEVENTEEN TIMES that we needed to reform Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae or have an economic disaster on our hands, and even though Democrats were in lockstep refusal to deal with the landmine that caused us to implode in the first place.  But you are way too much of a twisted unhinged ideologue to apply the same argument to Obama now. What happened while Bush was president was Bush’s fault; and what happened while Zero was president is still Bush’s fault.

Do I want to go back to Bush’s “failed policies” when unemployment never got above 7.6% and averaged 5.2% for his presidency? As opposed to “moving forward” with Obama and his 10%-and-rising level? Pardon me, but I’ll take Bush.

Democrats are currently saying, “Do you want to go back to the way things were when Republicans were in control?”

When Republicans were last in control prior to 2007, we had full unemployment with an unemployment rate of only 4.6%.

So, yeah.  I WOULD like to go back to the way things were when Bush and Republicans were in control.  And I frankly want to know what idiot wouldn’t?

As for your question as to whether Obama is some kind of a god, I can’t help but point out that it wasn’t conservatives who kept putting the halo on Obama’s head:

A funny video provides a giant montage of Obama halos.

We weren’t the ones who said “This is the moment when when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal,” either.

We weren’t the ones who said, “You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”  So don’t blame us for Obama not living up to the ridiculous expectations he and his liberal minions fed to the culture.

The fact of the matter is that Obama is such a miserable, total failure that I see that even you can’t admit you voted for him.