Did you see Condaleeza Rice's testimony to the Congress after 911. She said that she had sent a memo to the president before 911 that was titled, "Bin Laden trying to attack on US soil". The president never got to it. Terrorist attack on US soil do not happen everyday and it is not because of Bush that we are safe. We have a system in place that protects us and only an incompetent president can screw up. 1/20/09.
We all see our country going south but yet we just sit here and bitch about it. At some point, we should point the finger at ourselves for letting the corruption continue. Americans talk a great game, we really do but we forget about the application part. People only get away with, what you let them get away with.
In this case, however, the President is directly responsible for the mess we are in. He with a little help from his VP started a senseless war that will cost a minimum of three trillion dollars, and he appointed Cox as SEC chairman, And supported policies that resulted in the USA doubling its total debt. To put this in perspective, the additional debt of the GW Bush years is greater than all the debt acquired in the preceding 200 years. Had bush not done this, the cost of the present financial crisis would have been far easier to absorb. It can even be questioned whether there would have been a crisis had the SEC been under better leadership, and had Greenspan not taken the discount rate to 0.87% in November of 2003 with the intention of goosing the economy to help an unpopular GW Bush narrowly defeat Kerry in the 2004 election.
The dems pushing Fannie and Freddie to relax mortgage standards and allow their execs to profit from that also played a vital role in creating the problem. Also the law that Phill Gramm pushed to unregulate CDS was voted on 95 to nothing if memory serves. Plently of blame to go around, and 9-11, Katrina didn't help and had to be reacted to (though Iraq was the wrong reaction and a costly mistake). I am no fan of Bush but you just can't lay it all at his door as good as it feels to do so.