A New Bush Foreign Policy Emerges

DK, temping at Talking Points Memo summarizes::

"Afghanistan is reverting to the Taliban. Iraq is beyond the point of no return. North Korea is acting with impunity. Iran controls its own destiny.

"Worse, for an Administration that has instinctively favored military action over diplomacy, the nation's military resources are depleted, bogged down, and largely unavailable for any further foreign adventures.

"Yet we have stories emerging that suggest the current foreign policy dilemma is a deliberate course of action chosen by Bush. Time, in a mishmash of its news and style sections, calls it a 'strategic makeover' led by Condi Rice.

"The fact is Bush has boxed himself in, frittering away lives and treasure, and leaving himself with few options. He deserves no more credit for a policy shift than the man serving a life sentence who declares that he will henceforth be law-abiding.
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Billmon considers why we wait for the storm

Whiskey Bar: An Inconvenient Al:

". . . the political presumption against rationality is now shared, or at least pandered to, even at the top of the political and cultural pyramid. It’s curious that people who are paid to think and write for a living, and who, like Gore, attended the “best” schools, are now nearly as susceptible to the politics of ignorance as your average conservative talk show host, but then the elite media ain’t what it used to be. Like academia, it’s fighting a losing rear-guard action against the spirit of the times and the angry, irrational prejudices that go with it.

"But even more than academia, the old journalistic bastions of enlightenment liberalism – the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek – are vulnerable to the growing institutional and commercial pressures to tell the customers what they want to hear. And since conservatives are by far the larger and more economically attractive audience, the gravitational pull is perpetually to the right, which these days means the authoritarian right and the artificial reality it prefers to live in.

"In other words, even 'serious' journalism – and by extension 'serious' politics – is no longer a conversation between educated, largely secular elites, with the unwashed masses free to listen in as long as they don't challenge the wisdom of their socio-economic superiors. The masses are now educated too, not to mention economically empowered. And while this hasn't made much of a dent in the American tendency towards anti-intellectualism, it means the opinions and prejudices of the populist right can no longer be ignored or segregated in the fringe world of talk radio. . . .

"if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power."

The Blogging of the President

Stirling Newberry predicts a Bush slide: "Earlier I predicted a roughly 5% bounce in Bush's numbers - which is approximately what we've seen. However the same leading indicators which showed the bounce, are now turning against him. The people who are now 'marginally attached' to Bush support are the disorganized white working class . . . This is hard core Bush support."

Newberry's analysis is that this group, the Wal-Mart voter if you will, already very unhappy with gas prices, is going to be made miserable by the economy going south, in the days ahead.

Bush and Rove have been pushing back, with noises on Iraq and "victories" in the war on terror.

Is Bush & Co. going to quietly accept a slide into the 20's? The 20's, before a mid-term election, is lynch mob territory.

I have viewed the Bush visit to Iraq, the arrests of the terror-plotters in Miami and Lebanon, the Congressional debate on "cut and run", etc. as a Rovian rehearsal of strategies for pushing up Republican numbers in time for the November election. Does the evident success of these moves indicate that the Republicans will retain control of Congress?

More revelations on illegal spying to come???

Ally Warned Bush on Keeping Spying From Congress - New York Times: "In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters."

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Community College Dean Looks at the Macroeconomic Situation, and Panics: Brad DeLong explains that we shouldn't worry overmuch, because the richest, smartest people on the planet cannot be counted on to act irrationally and not in their own interest, even as the inevitable bears down on them:

"to achieve a soft landing requires that a huge number of people around the world watch the real value of their dollar-denominated assets melt away slowly for half a decade without ever being impelled to sell off the dollar-denominated positions in their portfolios. It could happen. It happened in the late 1980s, thanks to the Japanese central bank and the collected investors of Japan. It will probably happen again. It requires mammoth irrationality on the part of investors, and an extraordinary eagerness on the part of central banks to eat enormous losses on their dollar reserves. It is not a rational-expectations equilibrium. But it will probably happen.

But if it doesn't happen again--if there comes a day when the world's central banks and investors all decide that it is time to sell their dollar-denominated assets, then... Well, then we get to see how good a central banker Ben Bernanke really is. There is a really bad global equilibrium out there, which the world economy might jump to at any moment."

Brad fails to note that Japan paid for the privilege of giving Bush I and Clinton's America a soft landing with more than a decade of stagnation. But, hey, someone, somewhere wants to suffer for America's economic sins. Really, they do.

America in Decline

Vale to Babylon IV | TPMCafe: Sterling Newberry notes American Decline

". . . we are no longer able to speak the language of progress which the rest of the world hopes to share, but instead, we speak the language of protecting our place on the pinnacle, which is increasingly alienating to other nations."

The foolish choices of the Bush Administration add up to the destruction of the United States. They have flushed our honor and dignity down the toilet, for their stupidity and greed.

All eyes on housing

Econbrowser: All eyes on housing:

". . . statistics suggest to me that a recognition that the heady days of rapid real estate appreciation are now over had yet to sink in as of the first quarter of this year.

That troubles me, because it raises the possibility that, when the recognition does sink in, the current 'gradual cooling' could quickly turn into something more impressive."

It is a sad fact of political storms that economic discomfort is usually an underlying factor. Bush's economic policies have aimed, successfully, at bettering the lot of the very rich at the expense of everyone else. This would not normally lead to a recession, per se, but a recession in the aftermath Bush's reverse Robin Hood policies could be nasty. There is a very real possibility of even a mild downturn spiralling into a vicious cycle of economic decline and crisis.