Enough Blame To Go Around

Noted this on page one of today's bankrupt dead-tree L.A. TribuneTimes; planned to use the title "Heckuva Job, Bushie!" But they're all guilty,

U.S. soldiers board a C-17 aircraft at Baghdad International Airport last month as they begin their journey to the United States. (Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press/July 13, 2010)

as Robert Scheer, fired by the (Did we mention bankrupt?) Chicago Times, reminds us in a pre-emptive attack on Clinton revisionism, while taking a swipe at Tina Brown:

It was then that I realized that the revival of the Clinton legacy was on in earnest. Brown, a prominent Brit import, is an expert on refurbishing tarnished royalty, as she demonstrated with her gushing tribute to the Clinton wedding as “a happy throwback to the carefree 1990s.” So carefree that no one of importance, certainly not in the Clinton White House, took serious stock of the collapse of hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management, a harbinger of disasters to come.

In what I assume was not self-parody, Brown stated that “the Clintons are enjoying political rosy-glow syndrome. In the light of what’s happened since—two grueling wars, the implosion of debt, 14 million unemployed … Chelsea’s wedding allowed us to remember all that prosperity, those continuous Clinton surpluses.” But not, as I the party pooper must add, the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which enabled the financial bubble that caused those 14 million to be unemployed.

This all reminds me of the pass given that last attempt at American royalty, when the legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy came to be whitewashed so that his reckless decisions to invade Cuba and Vietnam were not to be mentioned. One can hear the “Happy Days Are Here Again” Democratic theme song as Hillary Clinton comes to be nominated after Obama has failed to solve the dire economic problems that his predecessors—Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush—left him.