George Bush's Makeover Tour is currently making the rounds of ConservaTalk, and yesterday morning he stopped by to chat with his successor as the leader of the GOP: Rush Limbaugh.
One of our great C&L readers, King Crimson, sent in some audio from today's gag-fest and wrote a post to accompany it. You may remember his last post, which exposed the false and racist attacks against the impoverished people in Detroit made by wingnut Ken Rugulski:
Rush Limbaugh Uses Innocent Detroiters As Show Pinata
This time around, King Crimson writes:
After the Great Depression, programs like Freddy May and Fanny Mac were set up to insure corporations against catastrophic risk to help make sure such a disaster could never occur again no matter how out of whack things got.
When George W. Bush was in office, he created what he called the "Ownership Society" initiative that abused those institutions in order to create an illusion that republican control was affording everyone, even those who couldn't afford it a new home or ridiculous cash advances on the mortgages they already held.
That was the mechanism that triggered the Great Recession of 2008. Republican policies, coupled with the complete lack of any kind of regulation over huge corporations and lending institutions playing fast and loose with mortgages and refi paper. Why not? If anything ever failed, the government would pay the losses! What's not to love? Except that the damages were so colossal that not even Freddy Mac and Fannie May could afford the tab they rang up. Hence the "Troubled Asset Relief Program" or T.A.R.P. It was the biggest government loan in history to try and contain the damage that Bush's regulation free ... free for all ... had exacted on our economy.
Today, former president George W. Bush so much as admits that it was precisely what occurred as he appeared on the Rush Limbaugh program to sell his book. "(There are some) enterprises that have got implicit government guarantee, and they're taking risky stances!" he recalls telling congress. I lived through the Bush administration, watching CSpan and following the news, every scintilla of it ... and I can say there never was a time in 2003 when George W. Bush made overtures to Congress about fears of corporations playing outside the rules...ever. But he insists to Rush that he did. Nonetheless, he admitted that it was indeed Wall Street that caused the recession.
But listen. A short time later, Rush gives Bush succor with a narrative that it wasn't Wall Street, it wasn't deregulation, it wasn't a republican controlled congress sitting on its hands in 2003 letting corporations do what they want because conservatives believe companies being free to do whatever they wish is the best thing for the economy. None of those things caused the Great Recession of 2008. No ... it was the Democrats, and Freddy Mac, and Fannie Mae that caused it. The political party that fought for the last 4 decades to rein in out of control Corporate greed, and creating programs to protect the country from financial shenanigans ... THEY were the ones who caused it.
Despite the fact that Rush's theme was exactly 180 degrees away from what the former president had just gotten through admitting not 45 seconds before, the Decider in Chief blurts, "That's right."
Bush doesn't even have to lie about the damage he did to this country and to our
economy anymore. He just stands there until someone does it for him, and then agrees.
