Skip to main content

American Tragedy

So George W. Bush has not had his opinion changed by his own intelligence reports?

So those reports indicate that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, and indeed has dramatically slowed such programmes that might lead to the development of such weapons.

Now, I am all in favour of being a little cautious, given the implications that would arise were Iran indeed to gain a nuclear capability.

Unfortunately the United States is saddled with a President who can not admit even a scintilla of doubt- no matter what. Having isolated his country and presided over a catastrophic economic weakening, the worst President in American history seems to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

I can't decide whether his arrogance is rooted in malignity or stupidity, but he has no political capital left. The tragedy is that we still have to wait for just over one more year for this catastrophically limited man to leave office.

It may yet be that still further disasters lurk for this man so that he can leave a truly uniquely disastrous legacy. However, unfortunately for Mr. Bush, politics is not like a game of Hearts- you can not still win if you "shoot for the moon"- all you leave are even bigger screw ups.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

devaneiosaovento said…
Boa Tarde,
sou do Brasil e cehguei até vc por meio de Joni Mitchell
fala português ou espanhol?
abraços
6:29 pm
Nicholas Vardy said…
The accuracy of incessant references to the "catastrophe" of the U.S economy eludes me... Last time I checked, the economic growth for Q3 was revised upward to 4.9%; productivity growth the same number (the highest in 4 years). The only thing thing lower seems to be the unemployment rate-which stands at 4.7%. Oh, and the federal deficit as a percentage of GDP which is down to 1.2%.

And all that against the headwind of a subprime nonsense. Picture the triumphalism in Brussels if any major economy in the EU would ever come within striking distance of any of those numbers...

Bottom line: Don't let grumpiness about an unsympathetic figure in the White House cloud your judgement about economic realities. If perception is projection, then it says more about the psychology of those making the sweeping (and inaccurate) assessments than the underlying reality
1:32 pm
Cicero said…
Hi Nick. Nice to see that your confidence in the US remains almost Panglossian! However, to quote from a piece recently published by Morgan Stanley, entitled "Recession Coming":

"We think overall housing starts will run below one million units in each of the next two years -- a level not seen in the history of the modern data since 1959,"

"US demand is likely to contract by 1pc each quarter for the first nine months of 2008, but the picture could be far worse if the Federal Reserve fails to slash rates fast enough. It is betting on a quarter point cut this week, with three more cuts by the middle of next year."

"Although the US job market has apparently held up well, an average monthly fall of 138,000 in the number of self-employed workers over the last quarter suggests it may now be buckling. Consumers face what could be a perfect storm,"
5:43 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more