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George W. Bush was not in over his head. If you study what happened in the Iraq war carefully, especially the comments General Pace made before retiring, it's clear the JCS and the intelligence community believed the Iraqi army was going to shift over to our side after we invaded and deposed Saddam. But instead of joining our side, the Iraqi army disbanded and collapsed due to lack of discipline and loyalty to their officers. Clearly our intelligence agents were talking to the Iraqi generals before the invasion and I think a lot of the Iraqi generals had agreed not fight our troops and to join our side after the war. We fully expected them to do that and preserve stability in Iraq after the invasion. Instead the Iraqi army just fell apart immediately and some of them turned into insurgents.

So you could say that the intelligence community and the JCS were in over their heads and totally miscalculated the behavior of the Iraqi army. That's probably a fair assessment. But George W. Bush and his administration made a lot of very tough decisions and dealt with very serious national security threats. As we look back now, it's also clear that they didn't fully understand that a huge housing market bubble was developing in America and they shouldn't have lowered interest rates so much and lowered mortgage application standards. But at the time, nobody expected so many people to pick up their marbles, throw a temper tantrum, and refuse to pay their mortgages when their houses started losing value. There had never been a big nationwide decline in home prices before so nobody knew what would happen in a big home price decline. We had been through regional plunges in home prices previously in California in the 90s and there were not a lot of mortgage defaults.

McCain wasn't that bad of a candidate. He had incredible energy for a 72 year old man. But he and Sarah Palin ran into two years of distorted, unbalanced 24/7 negative coverage of the war in Iraq by the heavily biased mainstream news media. The MSM rarely reported on the positive things happening in Iraq and the truth that we had finally given the Iraqis a chance to live in the kind of freedom that MSM presstitues take for granted every day. Then Lehman Brothers collapsed at exactly the wrong time two months before the election, leading to more wildly unbalanced and exaggerated news coverage of "economic meltdown" and "economic collapse" on a 24/7 schedule. Lehman sealed McCain's defeat, and I think it's probably no coincidence that it collapsed just before the election. (Would any Obama supporters on Wall St. and in the City in London care to comment on that statement?)