Bushview

When your approval rating is hovering around Nixon’s, you look far and wide to find an audience that will still treat you like a rock star, or at least not like a pariah. For years, military personnel have been reliable props for White House stagecraft, but even among people constitutionally required to salute him, enthusiasm for Bush has cooled. So George peddled his bullshit on Wall Street, where they buy just about everything.

So it was to this audience, exactly one day ago, that Bush said “Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our economy is strong.”

Tell that to, well, just about everybody else. You know, those people you don’t give speeches to.

People once again spent everything they made and then some last year, pushing the personal savings rate to the lowest level since the Great Depression more than seven decades ago.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005 and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Great Depression.

For December, consumer spending rose a solid 0.7 percent, the best showing in five months, while incomes rose by 0.5 percent [that must be the “real wage growth” referred to in the booklet distributed at Bush's Wall Street pep rally. -- Dr. S], both figures matching Wall Street expectations.

In other news, the Labor Department reported that the number of newly laid off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits dropped by 20,000 last week to 307,000. That improvement pushed the four-week average for claims to the lowest level in a year, indicating that the labor market remains healthy.

That is, if you consider 307,000 new unemployed people every week to be healthy.

But the news isn’t all bad. After all, ExxonMobil just reported a $39.5 billion profit for 2006, the largest annual profit by an American company ever.

It’s like the trickle-down effect. Just replace “down” with “up,” and “trickle” with “gushing.”

If you too want to see success in the face of overwhelming failure, if you want to see the world the way Bush does, all you have to do is learn to ignore inconvenient facts. All you have to do is come to a conclusion after minimal consideration of a situation and never let empathy, evidence or facts sway you from that position. Lots of people have already started doing this, notably Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, but none as successfully as Vice President Dick Cheney.