Inside Bush’s Brain: A Depression? ‘Bring It On’

This transcript appeared on my computer. It can’t be verified, but it sounds right.

POTUS is speaking.

“My dad was right about Voodoo economics. Remember when he said that? I should have listened. Now they’re putting that voodoo on me.

And he was also right about another thing: You never know who you can trust especially on this economy thing. That’s what brought him down, not Bill Clinton.

Look at all we did for business. We gave them just about everything they wanted and now I find out they have been stealing from us, from us, damn it, in Iraq and, yes, here in the homeland.

And it’s the finance guys that’s have been doing most of it. I should have listened to Laura. She knew. I heard that Jesse Jackson is marching on Wall Street. I should probably join him. Those guys can’t be trusted. They are screwing up the whole economy, not to mention their own banks. What a mess.

I told everyone from day one that I am a CEO president, not some hands on, bowtie- wearing, statistics-spouting policy wonk. And they knew business was never my forte.

I am a motivator, not a damn manager.

Things started out pretty good. We had a big surplus. Back in February of 2001, I remember giving a radio address Karl wrote for me. I was feelin’ upbeat, saying:

‘My plan reduces the national debt, and fast. So fast, in fact, that economists worry that we’re going to run out of debt to retire.’

Who knew 9/11 was just around the corner? When that happened, we understood they were after our economy, not our freedoms, but we couldn’t say that. We don’t want people thinking about all the money they play with down there on Wall Street.

We couldn’t let those terrorists get away with it ether. That’s why I told people that the best thing they could do when everyone calmed down was start shopping again.

Those wars to smoke ‘em out and bring ‘em to justice cost more than anyone calculated. Rummy thought we could go in with small units and take them out. Add some bombing and, boom, we would have a cakewalk. We really thought that, but as I learned the hard way, you can’t trust the Pentagon or the CIA to win wars. They screw it up every time. That’s why we have had to privatize everything. All of this ended up being very expensive but we couldn’t be stingy about protecting our people, could we?

So I figured, let’s finance this with OPM—you know, other people’s money. I thought it was pretty funny that the Chinese would be the ones putting up most of it. Who woulda thunk that those commies are bigger capitalists than we are?

But, as everyone with a credit card knows, once you start borrowing money, the interest goes up pretty fast. What’s our debt now, 9 trillion, l0 trillion? It’s way up there!

Everyone knows we can’t pay that back. We saw this film down in the White House screening room the other day, ‘In Debt We Trust,’ I think it’s called. They had this economist in it, a former Chase guy saying those debts are never going to be repaid:

‘Adam Smith said that no government had ever repaid its debts and the same can be said of the private sector. The U.S. government does not intend to repay its trillion dollar debt to foreign central banks and even if it did intend to, there’s no way in which it could.’

He’s right about that.

So now we have the Wall Street mortgage mess too, with all its doom and gloom. They turned a real estate boom into a big bust. Yup. It’s much worse than they’re letting on. They got greedy, and as we say in Texas, “A fool and his money is the roots of all evil.”

I never should have rehired that Greenspan. He would lug that big brief case around like he was a guru and then speak from both sides of his mouth. No one understood what he was saying anyway. He mumbled worse than Bill Casey when he ran the CIA. And now he tells 60 Minutes that he did it deliberately so he wouldn’t be understood. No wonder he has a best selling book. He’s the one who started all this interest rate cutting.

And then we got this Professor Bernanke. They told me he was an expert on stopping depressions. Now he is hinting that one may be coming. His boys at the Fed can’t seem to fix these problems, even by injecting billions and cutting rates.

They told me to let the dollar drop and we did. Yes, we are doing good overseas but who can go shopping in Paris anymore? That’s also driving up the price of oil and everything else. Those Euro people have turned our whole damm country into one big outlet store for Euro tourists. Talk about shopping…

So you know what, don’t tell anyone, but a depression might not be such a bad idea. Not a real bad one, but enough of one to get folks scared enough to realize they need a strong president.

How many terms did FDR serve when he had one? 3-4? When you have an emergency, you can put in emergency edicts. You can act presidential.

If everyone is suffering and bitching, they can’t say you are being unfair to any one group? And if it looks like we are going down, the rest of the world will step in because they have so much money invested here. We got ‘em by their cajones!

They will have to write down our debt and help us out.

That’s a win-win, don’t ya think?

What a great idea—its like my ‘Hail Mary Plan.’ We can let the economy unravel for a while, make some noise in the Rose Garden like Paulson’s housing bailout, and put the blame on Wall Street. You know the Democrats can’t say much because they went along with us on most of these economic policies because they get their money from business too. Their hands are also dirty. What hypocrites! Especially that Hillary. She’s the darling of the Hedge Funds.

There’s one more thing. A depression could end my depression. Everyone’s leaving the ship here and things have been so bad that I can barely enjoy Christmas. A bigger crisis would give me a chance to lead again.

So let’s bring it on.” The transcript ends here. It is undated but seems recent.

– News Dissector Danny Schechter directed In Debt We Trust (InDebtWeTrust.com) and just wrote the E-Book “Squeezed: America As the Bubble Bursts (ColdType.net) Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org

Popularity: 3% [?]

Amid the financial pressures facing the newspaper industry, investigative journalism has been hit hard.

My guess is that it has hit you harder Danny Boy,This is the largest problem with blog types NO VETTING , plenty of invention no wonder you want your sources secret — after all who wants their imagination questioned!!!
But of course we should believe every word of your B.S.

Nunya, way to go! Yes, you are right - it’s a “tongue n cheek” bit of writing. Sarcastic but well written - and really under it all, is some truth to this mess we are currently witnessing. If only we could really accomplish something like Congress working together and getting us out of this mess and standing up for the American people’s wishes!

If it wasn’t so sad it wouldn’t be so funny !

Sounds like Dan Rather is working again.

I’m not a conservative, but I didn’t think the article was funny either. It is presumably honest on the part of Shrub, but he says stuff that doesn’t fit into the framework– like for instance talking about how 9/11 was both unforeseen and the cause of the deficit–both of which are demonstrably untrue. He may be stupid and ignorant, but he is also a liar and a sociopath, and probably hasn’t uttered an honest word since he grew up. This satire gives Bush too much credit for really believing in what he has done and meaning what he has said. Wrong!!

Hey Danny!

Could you let me know if you really think that a depression is coming? People laugh but I live just south of flint, Michigan which is probably one of the hardest hit local economies around and if I lose anything else to this cowboy and jacked up country, I will be on the street.
PS Great movie! I just finished watching it and caught the web address at the end.