Cheney's dishonesty
Dick Cheney attempted to defend the Bush Administration's spending spree this morning on CNN's State of the Union:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said the administration was not to blame for poor economic conditions in the country, telling CNN's John King congressional Democrats had prevented it from heading off the financial threat posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that September 11 had forced the United States into "wartime mode" and spending.In truth, the Bush Administration increased non-defense discretionary spending dramatically, even before Hurricane Katrina. Also, as a percentage of GDP, defense spending was lower during the Bush's eight years in office compared to historic levels. And, let's not forget the expansion of an already massive entitlement.Asked by King about key measures of economic health that had declined during the Bush administration, Cheney replied that there were "all kinds of arguments to be made on that point, but there's something that's more important than the specific numbers you're talking about, and that had to be priority for our administration: eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by Al Qaeda terrorists here in America.
We immediately went into wartime mode, we ended up with two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of that still very active. We had major prob
The war in Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — "All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend or weren’t originally part of the budget," said Cheney. "Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did."
Blaming 9/11 and Katrina for the Republican spending spree, led by George W. Bush, is patently absurd. He became the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson, at least until Barack Obama.
Comments
President Bush did not even try to control spending. While Congress bears most of the responsibility, Bush did not veto a single bill until he had been in office 5 1/2 years. It was a clear signal that Congress could spend what they wanted, and they did. The blame goes to Congress for spending and to Bush for not even attempting to control the spending.
Posted by: Joe | March 15, 2009 01:31 PM
It is hard to trust a man who shoots his friend and hides in an undisclosed location. And the Congress is just a seething money pit with a scorpion for a leader.
Dark Knight
Posted by: Dark Knight | March 15, 2009 08:55 PM
Who are Bush and Cheney?
What impact do they have in todays politics?
What kind of power are they able to wield in Washington today?
Do you not think some are helping to propagate the OBOMA program by the very method OBOMA and his tax avoiding cohorts use to reflect from them that they are as inapt at fixing the economy as the previous administration was at tanking it.
While we talk about how Bush and his blunders are and have been ridden to death OBOMA and his bunch have been using just that to keep America focused on Bush not OBOMA.
Instead of holding those elected to clean up the mess accountable we take the position of "let's not clean up the mess let's use our energy to keep blaming the one who caused the mess"
Its called distraction and diversion .
Don
Posted by: Don | March 16, 2009 09:04 AM
Distraction is the name of the game my friend. And by diverting attention away from the problem then the average people won't see what is crawling through the back door. Obama has assembled a team of masters of illusion.
Posted by: The Doctor | March 16, 2009 03:03 PM
I don't think derailing a thread about something that Cheney said that was stupid is anything other than another distraction. We must learn from the past eight years. This will involve discussing the power players from that period. I think it is really funny to hear that the Democrats were able to prevent anything over the last eight years from happening. As far as I could tell, they laid down for nearly everything, and when they tried to take a stand, they didn't have the votes.
Posted by: Nathan Isenhardt | March 16, 2009 03:36 PM