More power

The George W. Bush eight year run is analogous to Tim Allen’s TV situation comedy show, Home Improvement. Tim Taylor – Tim the Tool Man – spent almost eight years with the constant answer to everything being - `more power’.

Somehow George Bush, under the direction of Dick Cheney, saw the answer for himself, the presidency and the nation to be `more power’. Poor Dick, his formative years under the tutelage of Don Rumsfeld during the decline and fall of Richard Nixon, viewed the presidency as weakened beyond belief by both the Congress and the courts during the Watergate scandal, and his mission in life seems to have been the restoration of those powers.

Cheney also viewed the Reagan era through a zealot’s eye and saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States to the unchecked empirical power as a near religious experience. Similarly, Dick took the tax, fiscal and monetary policies and their initial success as the end of economics as it had been known throughout history.

The rise of the neoconservatives and their constant harping on the economic and military power convinced the director and the decider that all rules were off when it came to the place of the United States in the world after the Cold War. Russia was a shell of its former Soviet self. China was barely on the horizon. And we were now an empire, an empire greater than that of Rome, England and all others at the greatest extent of their powers.

So, directed by Darth Vader and enabled by the likes of John McCain, George Bush ran roughshod over the Congress and the courts in seeking to restore what little power had not already been grabbed back and snatched new power wherever it could at the expense of the other two branches. New opinions from the Justice Department led the way to snoop on citizens and to interrogate those deemed our enemies. And they got away with it.

But the greatest mistakes of the Decider and the Director were in economics. They concluded that because Reagan got away without a scratch when huge deficits appeared on his watch that even greater shortfalls did not matter. But they did, and ultimately the spigot for new loans for we pawns and for the big boys and even the government itself would no longer be open.

They watched as the economic crisis played out hoping against hope that a third term could be won by their candidate, John McCain, thus validating their sorry butts. They almost got through the election cycle unscathed – but not quite. Last week the entire system trembled like a great fault line that was well past overdue and scared the hell out of thinking people everywhere.

Hank and Ben had to step in and stanch the flow of treasure by guaranteeing that all those lousy loans held by far over-leveraged greedy banks and institutions, so that the entire financial system of the country and maybe the world would not collapse.

So much for the genius of Reagan and the fanatical beliefs of George and Dick in `more power’; they couldn’t abolish the business cycle no matter how hard they prayed.

So it’s up to us to elect Barack Obama and turn these other bums out in shame.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ you!