Pardon moi, but I was not aware that we had anything like a growth economy for the last seven years. In my observation, George W. Bush became president and the economy here in these United States took a nosedive from which it has not recovered. The "economy" has not been good in all the years Bush has been in the White House. You want evidence? The Help Wanted section of the Boston Globe used to be so thick, it could be its own paper separate from the Sunday Edition. Now it's only a third of its former size. Sometimes even smaller. It seems strange that soon after Bush took office whole industries seemed to vanish overnight and thousands of jobs went with them. Part of this was the tech bust, of course, which was fueled by a dis-investment in start-up companies with an internet presence. Suddenly these people wanted companies to be (gasp!) profitable. Before the mentality was to burn through as much capital as possible as quickly as possible, which makes about as much sense as holding a bonfire for your winter wardrobe in January. Suddenly the pendulum swung back to being "profitable".

But stockholders wanted huge payouts every quarter. Double-digit growth and dividend checks that grew exponentially. There was an interesting fixation with "productivity gains" without actually hiring more people, so Wall Street players got rich and workers saw their gains go away to increased trips to the doctor for stress-related illness. So since nobody in the famed "middle-class" was making any appreciable gains, we turned to our houses for cash. But that's now run its course and there don't appear to be many more sleight of hand tricks the Fed can play to cover over the fact that unless real incomes rise for ALL of us, not just the haves and have-mores, you don't have a sustainable economy. In short, the economy was great for the very rich and the very richer with tax cuts and policies aimed at letting them keep more of their income while wages stagnated and costs exploded for everyone else. It's enriching the top at the expense of the bottom. Anybody who's ever played "Jenga" knows how that ends. Republicans love this "free market" confidence scheme and they forget how it usually ends in disaster for everyone. Since the economy is running on borrowed money, not savings and rising incomes, the bill is coming due and the horse thieves are about to ride out of town with ill-gotten wealth and leave us with the tab. We have been part of a grift that even Danny Ocean's crew could not have imagined. We may have to go back to basics: making things here and living within our means and saving money and investing wisely and growing wealth over the long-term. In order to do that, real income is going to have to grow for the middle class and this feudal lord/serf mentality is going to have to be abandoned. It may actually have to be fair for a change. Imagine that. Heading for a recession? What are you talking about? We never got out of it.

I cannot resist attempting to bring some semblance of sanity to this chaos.

Here's the first thing to consider and why we should be considering it. FOUR MORE YEARS OF BUSH POLICY enacted by Dubya wannabes. Ronald Reagan is irrelevant. Rudy Giuliani says he believes in what Reagan stood for: peace through strength, the harbinger of the Bush Doctrine of hubristic pre-emptive war. Every GOP contender wants to be like little man Bush. That is obvious to me without having seen a single Republican debate. Four more years of Bush's enacted ideology will destroy this country. This is the only consideration that makes sense, in my judgement. Right now the Democrats are running a sort of mock straw poll on their website to see who of these pretenders is the most representative of the Republican slate.

How does one begin to pick from such odious choices? My God in heaven, it's like picking from Hitler, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Kim Jong Il, and Dr. Idi Amin Dada as who best represents tyranny. So when we're thinking about electable candidates, think about who best represents your hopes, dreams, goals, and concerns about where the country is headed. If you want the Bible to be our standard, then Huckabee will make it happen, or try to. Mitt Romney might do that too, since he spent his time as Governor of MA trying to fight the whole gay-marriage thing here. If you like a more militaristic bite to your democracy, John McCain is your guy. He'll run the country like an armed camp. He'll keep us in Iraq indefinitely and leave the details about domestic issues to....somebody else. Forget about the economy or rising costs, 'cause these guys don't care about that. If you like the current every man/woman for himself/herself scene we have here in the US, any of these guys will work. Now, if you prefer a bit of hope, or a bit of original thinking or, God help me, a bit inspiration, you've got three fine candidates on the Democratic side, all of whom make this notion of "electability" very much the wrong argument. Same on the GOP side. So it's not about electability. It's about what kind of America do you want to live in the next four years?