It’s a fittingly chaotic curtain call for Bush

THE refusal by the US Congress initially to sanction President Bush’s $700 billion financial bailout amid the current global financial crisis provides a fittingly chaotic and ignoble curtain call for the Bush era.

The biggest fallacy in all of this is that the proposed bailout constituted some sort of pseudo-socialism and that Uncle Sam had suddenly metamorphosed into Uncle Karl.

This is about an incompetent president taking his eye off the ball to concentrate on his farcical war on terror and the Iraq disaster at the expense of more serious issues and then, when the financial system implodes, expecting the public to bail out the perpetrators of this disaster.

There are strong parallels between the Iraq/terrorism crisis and the financial one. Post 9/11 we heard Bush proclaim his apocalyptic warnings of doom, telling the world how Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and how the consequences of inaction would be unthinkable.

These words were echoed last week when he told the world how the American economy was teetering on the brink of catastrophe and the consequences of inaction would be unthinkable.

Sure, the words were juggled about on both occasions, but the thrust of the message was the same — don’t question your president. Trust me, I’ll sort it.

Then we saw what happened when power is vested in one man, or more correctly, one man and his bunch of fellow-extremists. The same people who showed a smug indifference to their own constitution, international strictures and conventions and who displayed complete disdain for domestic law in sanctioning wiretapping and torture in Guantanamo.

Can we honestly be surprised that a Congress, Democratically controlled since November 2006, refused to back his latest scheme when their vote wasn’t even deemed necessary by the Bush administration to declare war on Iraq?

Indeed, it was only the fact that the Democrats gained control two years ago that mercifully stopped the out-of-control Bush bandwagon in its tracks.

Bush was a lame duck from the start. Now the duck is dead in the water.

Thanksgiving is imminent, coinciding neatly with the presidential elections. The McCain campaign indicates more of the same lack of judgment and discretion. We can only hope the American people have seen the light and show their appreciation at having the chance to restore some sense of democracy by giving the Republicans their marching orders so we can finally see the back of this disastrous era in US history.

David Marlborough

103 Kenilworth Park

Dublin 6w