It drives me crazy that the Clinton narrative has been allowed to be rewritten over the past years. He was hard left and got slapped in the face by the voters after two years, just like Obama. From there, he became easily the most vicious partisan in modern political history. To his credit, he ultimately signed on to the right leaning agenda of the House. Alternatively, he battled it in pure nastiness, and then claimed the agenda as his own two seconds after caving.
It also drives me crazy that our side has let the prosperity during most of the Bush term get re-written as hard times. We were at full unemployment and many years of growth. There was no way we would see the same growth levels of the late 1990s. Bush came in with an economy that was dinged up a little but healthy. He kept it going through good taxation policy and let free enterprise prosper. I hardly know a person who was out of work even for a little but during those years (unlike 1999-2001 when many tech people we laid off multiple times as the dot com bubble burst). Things weren’t perfect, and Bush definitely did some things wrong, but we were in a good spot for a sustained period of time. If someone was full employed for 7.8 years and then lost a job in fall 2008, the left is making that out as a failure of all 8 years. As opposed to today, where people are permanently unemployed or underemployed, in the Bush years, few were in that situation.
Well, actually, that was a false prosperity fed with funny money by the Fed gargoyles, Alan Greenspan and "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. I think it's a fair ding -- the manufacturing base, the engine of our real prosperity, continued to go away during the Bush years with no attempt on his or congressional Republicans' (or Democrats') part to slow or arrest the financial trend toward disinvestment and cheesy, leveraged ripoff deals.
The prosperity, such as it was, of 2000-2008 was a sort of afterglow of the 80's and 90's bull -- the Reagan bull -- and the buzzards were already circling by 2000, the markets descending for a year before Shrub was sworn in.
If you want a bad guy for all this, look at the guys who went crazy bundling bad debt and default swaps. That's what wrecked everybody. Jamie Dimon, AIG, the guys at Bank of America and Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. (Who's back, btw, with their classically absurd "mighty steer" commercials. Yeah, I want market advice from a company that ruptured itself gorging on bad debt and derivatives.)
You’re right.
It was a single Democrat vote from Oklahoma that stopped Clinton’s BTU tax...
The liberals OWN the communication industries.
NOTHING will change until we get them back!