What we need to remember and remind others about

The reality is that millions of Americans are out of work, and most hard working Americans have lost nearly half of their wealth, and many their homes, because of the way George W. Bush and the radical Republican ideologues who enabled him ran the government--and ran it into the ground. The reality is that we had a surplus when Bill Clinton left office, and the only reason President Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion deficit that now constrains him is that George W. Bush and the radical Republicans believed in handing out suitcases full of cash to their wealthy friends with no strings attached and no transparency. Personally, I think that bears saying, and I think it particularly bears saying every time those same Republicans preach fiscal discipline, heap scorn on government "bailouts" they both necessitated and engineered, or offer their quasi-religious answer of "the free market" to every problem the market has created or failed to solve, from the crisis in the housing industry and the lack of regulations on Wall Street that took down our economy (and the world economy along with it) to the fact that most working Americans are now afraid of changing jobs for fear of losing their health insurance. Republican politicians would certainly be a little less quick to step up to the microphone if they knew that every time they talked about fiscal discipline, a Democrat would be there to remind them that they were the ones who went on a 6-year spending spree with our children's money and then handed the better part of a trillion dollars out to Wall Street bankers and speculators, sacrificing the American taxpayer at the altar of their free-market extremism. ~Drew Westen