The Reckoning - Bush’s Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire - Series - NYTimes.com

The Reckoning - Bush’s Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire - Series - NYTimes.com: "It was Sept. 18. Lehman Brothers had just gone belly-up, overwhelmed by toxic mortgages. Bank of America had swallowed Merrill Lynch in a hastily arranged sale. Two days earlier, Mr. Bush had agreed to pump $85 billion into the failing insurance giant American International Group.
The president listened as Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, laid out the latest terrifying news: The credit markets, gripped by panic, had frozen overnight, and banks were refusing to lend money.
Then his Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., told him that to stave off disaster, he would have to sign off on the biggest government bailout in history.
Mr. Bush, according to several people in the room, paused for a single, stunned moment to take it all in.
“How,” he wondered aloud, “did we get here?”"

"How did we get here?" Well, WTF do you think, you jackass. Maybe because you listened to Rush Limbaugh instead of a Nobel Prize winner in economics like Paul Krugman. Or did you really believe the World Wrestling Federation Strongman Larry Kudlow's attempt at economics. I wonder if Larry ever warned anybody off the Madoff gig, or was it to prestigious to stay away from. I started following national politics in 1973, and I have not seen this level of incompetence in all these years. At least Nixon had folks that knew what they were doing. Maybe wrong, not always right, and surely on the wrong side of the law (of course, they were Republicans) but at least they knew how to do it (well, except G. Gordan "the burglar" Liddy). It seems President Bush only employs incompetents.