dejavoodoo
Y’know… there are a couple ways of looking at the Sunday Morning gabfest with Arriana Huffington and Elizabeth Cheney.
HUFFINGTON: George, the truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney Administration wanted — full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbysists filling the very agencies they’re supposed to be overseeing —
WILL: So it’s Bush’s fault.
HUFFINGTON: — the industry.
WILL: Just clear this up.
HUFFINGTON: It is absolutely 1000 percent Bush-Cheney’s fault, plus the fact that the Obama Administration has not really done enough fast enough to change what’s happening at the MMS agency, at all sorts of other agencies. Not just when it comes to the energy problems, when it comes to Wall Street, all over, we are seeing the complete success of the kind of regulatory system that Bush-Cheney wanted. And we’re seeing this is the inevitable result of what they wanted.
CHENEY: You know, it’s truly amazing. I mean I actually heard George Bush was responsible for the breakup of Tipper and Al Gore’s marriage too. I mean it’s incredible the extent to which people are now trying to shift blame. And frankly —
MOULITSAS: Did you fact check that?
TAPPER: We’ll get that fact.
CHENEY: I heard it. I don’t know. I think it was on “The Daily Kos.” But at any rate, I think that, you know we got to look at what’s happening going forward, and you’ve got to look at the facts. I mean, the left is going to try — you guys —
HUFFINGTON: This has nothing to do with the left.
CHENEY: — have for years been demonizing Bush and Cheney, and I’m sure you will continue to demonize them for years going forward, but we have got now a catastrophe on the Gulf Coast, a catastrophe that happened on this administration’s watch which this administration is failing to clean up and be responsive and lead, frankly.
And it is a problem we’re seeing with this president across the board. A president with no leadership experience.
HUFFINGTON: Right here, we have the poster child of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism. Halliburton involved in this, and we haven’t said about that. They after all were responsible for cementing the well. Here’s Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars —
CHENEY: Arianna, I don’t know what planet you live on, but that’s not —
HUFFINGTON: — it’s involved again. I’m living on this planet. You’re living in a planet that is —
CHENEY: — it’s — Arianna, what you’re saying —
I know how the apolitical, or the structured concerted bi/non partisan. It is the televised biopic or the various conservative news magazine articles and books that put the blame of 9/11 squarely and forthrightly on the malfeasance of Bill Clinton, though as always things are quite a bit more complicated. There is a certain mind-set that will, quite understandably, put these two lines of argument as an equivalence. And it is there that a reference to “Bush De-regulatory mess” problem comes across as even if accurate analysis — for policy uses in where we must proceed, somewhat evasive and sometimes ineffective politics.  The sense is quite understandable that we are just running from a partisan “Blame Clinton First Crowd” to a “Blame Bush First Crowd”.
It’s sometimes hard to reset the continuities and failed incontinuities from one administration to another. That the Obama Administration was only now setting its sights on conquering the problems of the Minerals Management Service — bringing to mind the re-curring thought “God, that was a bad President we had” — may look badly on the current president and his lack of aggressiveness in breaking from that past.
But there I drop back to — okay, Clinton… Bush… lead up to 9/11… where was that fumbled? More to the point, weren’t Cheney’s cohorts making that case?