GREENSPAN PAINTS A PICTURE OF BUSH AS A BUMBLING, CONTEMPTIBLE FAILURE... SURPRISED?

The Bush Regime orchestrated concerted efforts to demonize or trivialize critics who had departed from its inner sanctum. People disgusted with the dishonesty, the Mayberry Machievellis, the incompetence, the illegitimacy got a certain kind of treatment from Regime Insiders and the Establishment traditional media members who valued their places at the foot of the bed. Everytime another Insider became an Outsider and told all, you would think, "Well, this is it; they can never sustain this." But they always did. EPA heads, Treasury Secretaries, generals, faith folks... anyone who complained became a non-person after one news cycle. Somehow, I don't get the impression they can do that anymore, not effectively-- and not to as big a bigger than life personage as Alan Greenspan... although they may want to by Monday.

The former Federal Reserve Chairman, a lifelong Republican, has written a book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World and he slams Bush and his rubber stamp Republicans. According to today's Wall Street Journal Greenspan feels they deserved to lose power last year-- and it doesn't look like he thinks they deserve to win it back next year.

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a "lifelong libertarian Republican," writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb "out-of-control" spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush's failure to do so "was a major mistake." Republicans in Congress, he writes, "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

...Mr. Greenspan writes that when President Bush chose Dick Cheney as vice president and Paul O'Neill as treasury secretary -- both colleagues from the Gerald Ford administration, during which Mr. Greenspan was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers -- he "indulged in a bit of fantasy" that this would be the government that would have resulted if Mr. Ford hadn't lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. But Mr. Greenspan discovered that in the Bush White House, the "political operation was far more dominant" than in Mr. Ford's. "Little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences," he writes.

This morning Bloomberg is also featuring Greenspan's hard criticism of the Bush Regime. They report that Greenspan says their agenda was driven by politics rather than sound policy or future consequences. It rings true since it is also clearly what we see in all aspects of the regime, and is especially apparent in regard to foreign policy. Greenspan worked for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II.

Greenspan saved his harshest analysis for the current president. Soon after Bush took office in 2001, the president set about implementing a campaign promise to cut taxes, a policy Greenspan said he believed at the time wasn't well conceived.

"Little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences,'' he wrote.

And Greenspan isn't the only big-name Republican says screaming that the emperor has no clothes. Newt Gingrich, who already dubbed the GOP's dismal presidential lineup "a pathetic bunch or pygmies"™ and says the Republicans have, at best, one a 1 in 5 chance to win the White House next year, says "Republican presidential candidates need to make a 'clean break' from President George W. Bush and the U.S. government... 'If you don't represent real change, you just gave away the 2008 election.'"

Gingrich cited the Iraq war, the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina two years ago and the inability to control U.S. borders and illegal immigration as evidence of a need for a complete overhaul of the U.S. system of governing.

"Now that may or may not make the White House happy. But I think that's the whole point about making a clean break," Gingrich told a group of reporters over breakfast.

He added: "I believe for any Republican to win in 2008 they have to ... offer a dramatic, bold change. If we nominate somebody who has not done that, they get to be the nominee but there is very, very little likelihood that they can win."

The problem, even more than the poor quality of Republican candidates, is the fact that the base Republican voters who will determine the winners of the primaries are so extreme and so out of sync with mainstream Americca that anyone who can win them over with alienate the moderate voters who will elect the next president.


UPDATE: AND THAT LITTLE WAR BUSH STARTED...

Greenspan says what we knew all along anyway: it was all for the oil. Impeachment is still off the table? How about a last cigarette and a blindfold?


UPDATE: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

It'll probably be good for book sales, but the Bush Regime chimed in this morning with a slapback for the one part of Greenspan's thesis they can't afford to leave unchallenged-- his revelation that Bush's attack on Iraq was mostly about oil. I'm not sure what they say it was about anymore. WMD? Women's rights? Liberal democracy? Evil dictators? 9/11? Terrorists? Robert Gates unmasked himself-- for anyone who believed there was still even a shred of a figleaf covering anything up-- as a 100% company man and Regime tool while he spread his propaganda lies on Stephanoploulos' show. Yawn. How many more days?