My reply to that? If you ask the Chinese, they'll tell you they are the good guys. If you had asked the people of the old USSR, they'd say they were the good guys. If you ask the Taliban, they will tell you they are the good guys (and Godly on top of that.) Ask the Saudis and their religious police? Ditto. Ask the Israeli troops bombing and bulldozing in Gaza? Also good guys. The Palestinians? Hama? Yep. They too are the good guys.

My point here is that the self-perception of a nation's people is often not an objective thing. It is the product of indoctrination ("God bless America!, Land of the Free!, fighters for truth, justice and the American way!") over a period of years and at every level from school to home to the public square.

China does a lot of pretty bad stuff. (Tibet or Tiananmen Square anyone?) But so do we. We invade nations which have no attacked us. We leave masses of our people without adequate food, shelter or healthcare while doling out trillions of dollars to mega-conglomerate banks and Wall Street firms. We lock away a higher percentage of our populace (and for much longer, more draconian terms) than even the Red Chinese or the USSR (and even Saddam Hussein in Iraq!) at the height of their powers.

The world is not a place of good and bad, black and white. It is a place colored in a million shades of gray. And the opinion about who is good and who is bad? That often depends on which side of the fence you are standing.

Really. When you pull back the curtain, the wizard disappears. Stock markets are many things but rational they are not. The continued contraction of the ISM along with the continued grim news about unemployment/layoffs ought to have some dampening effect, but every bit of "not as awful as it might have been" news is being spun as though it were in fact positive.

If I were looking for analogs to this sort of "thinking", I guess could posit a situation in which the captain of the Titanic comes out and says "Good news! We've hit an iceberg and we were taking on water much faster than we could pump it out, but now we are losing ground at a slower pace." Comforting, eh?

Wow. I have to disagree with you there. I believe that we simply must be grounded in reality. Wishful thinking leads to behaviors on the part of individuals which may leave them much worse off. ("Don't worry about what it costs. Just put it on the credit card. Things are getting better. My job is safe.")

Wishful thinking (which is what false optimism is) also may give rise to actions on the part of the government which leave all of us on the hook, or at least leaves us mere proles on the hook, for sums of money that are hard to comprehend by the mind of the average person. No thanks.

Let's live in reality. Please.

We need to exude some confidence in ourselves to fix the economy. Our President sure has that outlook. Do you think Barack is a fool for that stance?

Is Obama a fool? I guess that depends on how you define fool.

If a fool is someone that bucks his bosses, his 'Master of the Universe' overlords who are responsible for making his rise to power possible, then Obama is no fool. He is doing exactly what they wish. It is nothing more than a continuation of Bush/Paulson/Government Sachs corruption/subservience to the investment in propping up the status quo which we saw from the last administration.

But if a fool is someone who is serving his masters even as he knows (and surely he must know) that what he is doing is just another variation on trickle down ("We pee on their heads and tell them that it's nutrient rich rain") economics where the "fix" is to pour the money in at the top rather than using it to put a floor under the bottom, then yeah, Obama is a fool.

Optimism in the face of adversity ("We have nothing too fear but fear itself") is one thing. But actions which result in potentially trillions of dollars of losses being foisted off onto the masses in order to privatize profits and socialize losses? That is something else entirely.

Stupid is as stupid does.