A Country With Nobody in Charge

The Bush era is closing on a downer. More than four out of five Americans, 81 percent, are unhappy with the way the country is going, the New York Times/CBS News mood poll tells us today, with the economy replacing terrorism and the war in Iraq at the top of their worry list.

They blame government for the housing crisis more than banks or home buyers and favor help for individuals rather than financial institutions.

But that's not what's happening in Washington. After the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the Senate is cobbling a $15 billion bill that provides tax breaks for home builders but leaves out a provision Bush threatened to veto that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to restructure mortgages to keep owners in their homes. They did include $100 million for counseling people facing foreclosure, presumably to help the newly homeless feel better about their situation.

The March decline of 80,000 jobs is the third in a row, signifying a real recession. For those who still have jobs, wage increases failed to match inflation, in effect giving them a pay cut.

As voters watch their Executive Branch and Congress fumble and stumble on the economy, they may also be depressed by the bottomless quagmire in Iraq that continues to consume lives and billions of dollars. The Petraeus-Ryan tap dancing team will bring very little convincing cheer from a country where the newly trained freedom fighters desert in droves when called into action.

Somebody should check on what the 19 percent of Americans who think the country is going in the right direction have been smoking.

A Trillion Here, a Trillion There

A publisher I knew once proposed a picture book, "They Must Know What They're Doing or They Wouldn't Be Where They Are," to show the captain of the Titanic, the designers of the Edsel, LBJ running the War in Viet Nam and other overseers of spectacular 20th century blunders.

The Bush Administration now rates a sequel all its own for being in charge of two cataclysms, in the Middle East and here at home.

As Bear Stearns, the poster boy for Wall Street greed, gets gobbled up with the help of taxpayer money, Paul Krugman today asks, "When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren’t also bailing out the people who got us into this mess?"

Not much is the answer, he points out, citing "false beliefs in the private sector" that "led to an epidemic of bad lending" and how "false beliefs in the political arena --the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing--led Washington to ignore the warning signs."

Now even the temple of free enterprise, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, is yelling "Uncle," editorially calling for a "more aggressive, and pre-emptive, regulatory role for the Fed...to restore its monetary credibility, or today's panic could become tomorrow's crash."

In assessing the cost of Iraq and the financial meltdown here, Washington is going to have update Everett Dirksen's old maxim, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." Just add the zeroes and pray for some real brains and leadership in the White House next year.