09-17-2009, 01:06 AM
michaelb wrote:
Maybe this is semantics, but I don't see how Bush can be seen as "incompetent". He was in many ways very effective, and he steamrolled the democratic oppostion for most of his presidency; successfully advancing his agenda and his policies. I don't see how that is "incompetence". It is much simpler and more accurate to say he was "wrong".
That's a fair point. I probably should have said he was mostly incompetent in his governance, but he certainly did manage to politically leverage 9/11 effectively against the Democrats.
michaelb wrote: But not about the bailout. His administration was wrong, and possibly incompetent, in their oversight and regulation of the financial industry in the years leading up to last fall. But they were blinded by idealogy to what should have been increasingly obvious. But once we got to last fall and the bailout, there really was no other choice and little time or opportunity to evaluate the options.
I wasn't saying that he showed incompetence because he decided to do some kind of a bailout, but the fact that he thought he was signing off on a program where they would "buy low and sell high" when that wasn't what the program would do showed a lot of incompetence given his 8 years as president and that it involved a really, really huge sum of money (enough to pay for a medical reform public option for several years).