Pick Your Bush

"(The answer is: Start a fight with Iran, of course. Letting him play with his veto pen is obviously preferable, no?)"

The Cost of Bush

A new report from Joint Economic Committee Democrats concludes that the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could balloon to $3.5 trillion over the next decade because of such hidden costs as long term veteran's health care, foregone investment, oil market disruptions and interest payments on borrowed war funding.

Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz writes for Vanity Fair: "When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page. . . .

"Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle 'worst president' when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover's policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush's presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America's being displaced from its position as the world's richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush."

Ever the Optimist

Edmund L. Andrews and Robert Pear write in the New York Times: "Even in the darkest times, President Bush has been able to draw hope from the almost uncanny ability of the American economy to endure shock after shock with surprisingly limited damage.

"Mr. Bush expressed the same optimism on Tuesday, praising the economy as resilient and reminding people that it bounced back after the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

"'This economy is flexible, it is dynamic and it is competitive enough to overcome any challenge we face,' Mr. Bush told business and civic leaders in New Albany, Ind. . . .

"Some economists worry that the economy's stamina may have hit its limit. Mr. Bush faces a fearsome trifecta of shocks, each of which is daunting: soaring oil prices, a meltdown in housing and mortgage lending and plunging consumer confidence."

The Fox News President

Bush chooses his interlocutors with care. (See my Sept. 26 column, Bush's Media Cherry Picking.) So it's not surprising that he showed up on Fox again yesterday -- but this time it was for an interview with Fox's fledgling business channel. (He did an embargoed interview with Fox News the day before.)

Fox Business News anchor David Asman's questions were not just predictably sycophantic -- they were beyond that. They gave sycophancy a bad name. And some were specious as well.

Here's the first part of the video. ( Mark Silva blogs for Tribune with extensive excerpts of the interview.)

Asman's first question: "You call yourself a supply-sider. Your speech today was all about tax cuts. But were even you surprised at how much revenue came in to the Treasury when you lowered those tax rates?"