President Bush and the Bailout: And the Winner is? al-Qaida!

Never in the history of the United States have a president and his political party played into the hands of the enemies of this nation as have George Bush and the Republican Party.

It’s easy to envision Osama bin Ladin laughing in his Pakistani cave as he watched the U.S. deficit surge with the $700 billion Wall Street bailout on October 3rd.

Years ago, al-Qaida told the world how they would defeat the United States; they would bankrupt us, just like they claimed they did to the Soviet Union in their guerrilla war in Afghanistan.

It began in 2001 when the president showed his national defense judgment by ignoring over fifty intelligence warnings of an impending al-Qaida attack within the United States. After 9/11, the president, his party, and their right-wing noise machine used that tragedy to create fear as they manipulated the public to support a war against Iraq, a nation our intelligence services knew was not involved in the attack.

The war and occupation have cost hundreds of billions of dollars; and the final bill is estimated to be between one to three trillion.

We have needed to borrow that money because the president reduced taxes on the rich. That’s why the budget surplus under President Clinton became a huge deficit, and why the total debt of the United States has nearly doubled since Bush took office.

Along with the tax cuts and the war, the president’s other economic policies have produced the worst job creation during any business expansion (lasting longer than three years) since before the Great Depression. Nor can we forget average family income has plummeted $2,000 a year since Bush took office.

The president did nothing about these problems even though common sense suggests they crimped the demand for goods and services, and this may have helped to bring on the contraction sooner than what might otherwise have occurred. For the same reasons, the recession should also be deeper. The two problems likely yielded lower federal tax revenues than what a historically normal business expansion would have provided.

Job losses are mounting, federal tax revenues are dropping, the deficit is surging, the dollar is skidding, and the stock markets are in turmoil. None of this should inspire confidence in this nation’s lenders, most notably the Chinese.

The day of reckoning may be approaching and there may be nothing we can do if our lenders become edgy and cash in their chips. When that happens, the triumph of al-Qaida will be complete. And no one will at fault other than our leaders during their war on terror: George W. Bush and the Republican Party.