Paul Krugman: "The Texas Strategy"

Oh dear. Our president calls himself:

• the uniter (we call him the divider),
• the decider (the derider is more like it),
• the agonizer (uh... he causes agony but I suspect that he rarely does battle with a decision greater than whether ketchup counts as a fruit & vegetable serving according to the FDA; according to another brain trust, Nancy Reagan, it does)
• the deliberator (of course, with Bush, this does not refer to thinking but instead, to the removal of freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution as he insists that the "terr'ists" - I think he means terrorists but English is clearly not his first language - hate us for our freedoms)

And now he's the strategerist (he's big on strategeries rather than strategies) with the nimble-minded economist Paul Krugman, in his latest column, doing us the great favor of trying to translate what that means to us (besides, we're screwed, which is what Bush's plans always mean to us). Read Krugman in its entirety here, but I'm serving up a generous schnibble.

Hundreds of news articles and opinion pieces have described President Bush’s decision to escalate the Iraq war as a “Hail Mary pass.

”But that’s the wrong metaphor.

Mr. Bush isn’t Roger Staubach, trying to pull out a win for the Dallas Cowboys. He’s Charles Keating, using other people’s money to keep Lincoln Savings going long after it should have been shut down — and squandering the life savings of thousands of investors, not to mention billions in taxpayer dollars, along the way.

The parallel is actually quite exact. During the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, people like Mr. Keating kept failed banks going by faking financial success. Mr. Bush has kept a failed war going by faking military success.

The “surge” is just another stalling tactic, designed to buy more time.Oh, and one of the favorite techniques used by the owners of savings and loan associations to generate phony profits — it involved making high-interest loans to crooked or flaky real estate developers — came to be known as the “Texas strategy.”

What was the point of the Texas strategy? Bank owners were certainly gambling — with other people’s money, of course — in the hope of a miraculous recovery that would bail out their negative balance sheets.

But the real point of the racket was a form of looting: as long as they could keep reporting high paper profits, S.&L. owners could keep rewarding themselves with salaries, dividends and sweetheart business deals.

Mr. Keating paid himself a million dollars just weeks before his holding company collapsed.

Which brings us to Iraq. The administration has spent the last three years pretending that its splendid little war isn’t a big disaster. There have been the bromides (we’re making “good progress”); the promises (we have a “strategy for victory”); and, as always, attacks on the media for not reporting the good news from Iraq.

Who you gonna believe, the president or your lying eyes?

Now Mr. Bush has grudgingly sort- of admitted that things aren’t going well — but he says his “new way forward” will fix everything.

So it’s still the Texas strategy: the war’s architects are trying to keep their failed venture going as long as possible.

The Hail Mary aspect — the off chance that somehow, things really will turn out all right — is the least of their motivations. The real intent is a form of looting. I’m not talking mainly about old-fashioned war profiteering, although there is no question that profiteering is taking place on an epic scale. No, I’m saying that the hawks want to keep this war going because it’s to their personal and political benefit.

The rest is here.

[Ed. note: In case you don't know this already, one of Dubya's brothers (and Crybaby Poppy Bush's sons), Neil, was involved in the Savings & Loan scandals of the '80s. We've been bailing these bastards out for ages and, as a result, they have never learned to take any responsibility for their actions or even been so much as mildly inconvenienced (though we were, we definitely were and are.]