Replies

OK, I haven’t really discussed the President’s role in all of this. Understand: he is very smart; one of the wittiest, most likeable people you could ever be around. He suffers from a couple of problems. One is that he speaks like a Texan and, as Jeff Foxworthy says, “When people hear you have a southern accent, they immediately deduct 50 IQ points from how smart they think you are.”

If Bush is so smart how come he's falling for this?

'President Bush just believes his friends would not ever manipulate him (at least he doesn’t until they write a book and prove that they would and did.) He believes what Sec. Paulson and his minions have told him.'

I think the President expects people to be as 'non-partisan' as he tries to be. He has said that he is the President of all of the people. I wonder what he will say this morning.

“If Bush is so smart how come he’s falling for this? “

Bush is following typical good-management practice. Hire a competent person and trust them to do their job. Dont micromanage.

In a typical job, that’s fine, but here it can have drawbacks, if the hired hand walks away from the core principles of those who voted for you.

Hank Paulson is a competent person in charge of this arena. But Paulson is not really a conservative or Republican, he’s a Wall St guy.

The problem is, as noted, Bush is trusting a non-conservative with a wall-st-centric view to manage this crisis. What we got was a wall-st bailout that give Paulson all the authority.

Bush admin got burned over the Juctice Dept firings, and since then

The formerly ‘conservative Bush’ administration is not really conservative at this point. He’s been lame ducked into being an establishment figurehead of a govt whose non-conservative permanent bureaucracies have “won”, thanks to the Democrat Congress that would go after conservative ‘interference’ with the work of the liberal Democrats who staff these agencies. viz. the Justice department wasting many man-years to investigate the lawful and proper firing of US attorneys.

Its a neat trick, but the irony is that Obama’s ‘change’ will be less ‘change’ than McCain’s ‘reform’.