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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Any insistance on blaming one party, 
> or the other, is nothing more than sheer cussedness.

Well, it's pretty lame at any rate.

But let's be clear not only whom we are blaming but what are we blaming them 
with.

One third of the "value" (wink, nod, nuge) of stocks has evaporated in a 
month.  If a person was depending on the performance of their stock holdings, 
directly or indirectly, they have a tendency to view this as "I lost money".

No you didn't.  You didn't lose any money, you lost the promise of money, not 
(even) the money itself.  The (ever how many) trillions the total holding in 
stocks was supposed to have been a month ago, or a year ago, it did NOT 
represent any real prospect of those stock holders having access to that many 
goods 
and services.

Now to the blame.  The thing for which someone is owed blame is making the 
promise to you that you had the prospects for that amount of money, or that 
amount of goods and services when in fact that was unrealistic and everyone 
knew 
you had no such feasible claim.

It seems as if (and I can't help but think Don is much more savvy than this) 
that if only Bush, or the real culprits ACORN and Clinton with the help and 
encouragement of Obama, had only done something differently, held their 
mouths a 
different way, just pursued a different policy, then they would have all that 
"money" today.  Damn bastards lost all my money!!

But the truth is, had they done the right thing back then, the 401K holders, 
pension holders, and stock holders would never have been promised the returns 
that have not materialized.

Can you imagine Bush coming out in 2003 or 2004 and telling Gene that he was 
going to introduce legislation that would thwart his selling houses for 
inflated prices?  Or to tell Don (if this fits, Don, just hyperbole) that his 
investments were only going to grow by 2% a year for the next two decades?  
The very 
bandwidth would have been blistering with the language!   Damn Bush!

So the real issue here is not that Bush (or whomever we care to blame) has 
lost $3 trillion of people's savings and investments, but rather that he (or 
they) was not honest with people all along that the increased "wealth" was an 
illusion and indeed never really existed.


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