The cynic in me wonders if there’s some sort of method to themadness. Maybe they really do want theeconomic base to be so gutted that the incoming Obama administration is handcuffed if not fully accessorized with cement shoes.
Or maybe it’s just history repeating itself–Mr. MBA and failure go way back. Indeed, his only “success,” if it can be called that, came inbaseball, a licensed monopoly (and even then, value was added mostly by some eminent domain arm-twisting mixed with sweetheart deals and political connections to construct a new stadium financed largely with taxpayer dollars.)
As the economy lurches towards January 20th, it looks like a fair swath of the GOP is washing their hands of the whole affair (asKrugman noted last night.), the latest example of course being their come-what-maydismissal of the domestic auto industry … to be fair, you could hardly find a more dismal trio of industry representatives thanMoe, Larry, & Curley Wagoner, Mulally, and Nardelli, but again citing Krugman, their Stoogesque performance shouldn’t blind us to the potential loss of over a million jobs in the midst of an ongoing financial crisis. That’s not just pouring gasoline on a fire–that’s pouring gasoline onto a fire using a firehose.
Actually, the REAL cynic in me wonders if this was part of a broader plan that might well have succeeded if it hadn’t blown up at the last moment in Team Bush’s face. Suppose they had managed to keep a lid on things until the third week of January, 2009…Obama gets inaugurated, the wheels fall off, the incoming Democratic administration is left holding a fetid, rotting, stinking bag of failure, wingnuttiastan howls and bays about “irresponsible libruls,” hacks like Cokie Roberts sing the chorus…setting the stage for ‘nut “redemption” in 2012 and consignment of Obama as this century’s Jimmy Carter.
Which could still happen: shoot, my own mom has taken up the wingnut chant of blaming Obama for the economic mess, even though he hasn’t yet been sworn in…logic not being at all necessary, even tangentially, to the belief structure.
I guess we’ll see what happens.