Rummy Loony

Don Rumsfeld, who is both a clinical narcissist and a sociopath (Bush also, but Cheney a sociopath and megalomaniac, take note, students), has finally jumped the shark.

"In a cranky speech Tuesday to an American Legion audience, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld compared critics of U.S. policy in Iraq to those who sought to appease Hitler before World War II. For good measure, Rumsfeld suggested (echoing Jeane Kirkpatrick's liberal-bashing speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention) that those same critics "blame America first."

That's the LA Times trying to make it sound not-so-bad. But Rumsfeld's analogies went much further; what he was really doing is reversing all historical reality to make a point that can't be made, and as many more able pundits than myself have noted, he came off sounding 1) ignorant 2) insane 3) dangerous.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who have done nothing to endear me (because they have done nothing) are finally stirring in their sleeps, and have actually, baldly attacked Don of Darkness:

"Secretary Rumsfeld’s reckless comments show why America is not as safe as it can or should be five years after 9/11," said Reid's statement. "The Bush White House is more interested in lashing out at its political enemies and distracting from its failures than it is in winning the War on Terror and in bringing an end to the war in Iraq."

"If there's one person who has failed to learn the lessons of history it's Donald Rumsfeld," Reid said.

Pelosi mentioned the torture that went on in Iraq's Abu Ghraib as one "failure" that happened during Rumsfeld's tenure.

"The policies that led to the horrors at Abu Ghraib were developed on Mr. Rumsfeld's watch," said Pelosi. "For him to now lecture on moral clarity is a fresh embarrassment to the nation."

"His comments offer additional evidence that the end of his tenure as Secretary of Defense can not come soon enough," added Pelosi."

That's red meat for pissed-off voters. And the Democrats are going to attempt to use comments such as Rumsfeld's to paint Bush and the Republicans into a corner: are you with these assholes, or agin' em? With, of course; the Dem strategy woould have the Repugs trying to distance themselves from weach other right when they most need a united front, 10 weeks from election day.

But you knew there was bad news, right, kiddies? And Uncle will not disappoint.

If the Dems win in November, which I doubt, because they have not addressed the systemic fraud built into the voting machines, vote-counting methodology, and gerrymandering, they will inherit something much chunkier than mere wind.

"But the housing bubble is deflating rapidly. I expect at least a 20% decline in median single-family house prices nationwide, and that number may be way understated. A bursting of the bubble would force many homeowners to curb their outlays in order to close the gaps between their income and spending growth. That would surely precipitate a major recession that would become global, given the dependence of most foreign countries on U.S. consumers to buy the excess goods and services for which they have no other markets."

That's from no less a source than Forbes--  and if those ultra-conservative moneygrubbing bastards will allow this kind of thing to appear in print, you know the problem has got to be bad (and also that the editors have recession-proofed their money).

Even stuffier source:

"The much bigger effect of a housing slump, however, is likely to be on household balance sheets. According to the Federal Reserve’s latest figures, the total amount of residential housing wealth in the US just about doubled between 1999 and the first quarter of 2006 — up from $10.4 trillion (£5,500 billion) to $20.4 trillion.

Thanks to a highly efficient housing finance market, Americans have been withdrawing a significant part of this wealth to finance current spending. Exactly how much they have withdrawn is hard to gauge, but the wealth effect of housing on spending has been observed to be substantially larger than traditional estimates of the wealth effect of equities, which is about 1.5 per cent. If the right figure for housing is 3 per cent, that suggests over $300 billion has been taken out in the past six years, about $50 billion a year, or an average of about 0.4 per cent of US GDP. This seems a conservative estimate, as some economists put the wealth effect much higher."

See, if the Democrats take control of even one House, they will immediately be blamed for the collapse of the world economy, and the commercial media will run with that narrative because it is so easy to pitch. Even though the real problems go all the way back to the moderate Republican Bill Clinton, so you can hardly blame the Dems. The Republicans will only have to wait 2 years, then they can blame the Dems for the financial ruin of the United States, take the White House once again, and that's it, folks, you can work for Wal-Mart or you can move to France and grow potatoes.

It's going to be an exceedingly interesting winter.

Ben Tripp, author of Square in the Nuts, is a hack in many mediums.

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