The economy is imploding

For six years I've been expecting this to come down the pike. So it's taken a little longer than I'd thought:

(article)

Now, this piece doesn't blame Bush for anything per se. Also - who knows? The proactive and somewhat unprecedented actions being taken by the Fed may succeed somewhat in containing the damage. But it's Bush's $3 trillion war in Iraq that has put a squeeze on government resources, his downshifting of the tax burden onto the middle class that has squeezed the economy generally: and it was his administration's solution to this problem to create magical wealth for regular Americans by loosening regulation of our housing markets - letting us take on mortgages we couldn't afford, which caused the entire market to be bid up into a bigger balloon than the notorious tech bubble of the 90s. Possibly worse still, he has allowed "financial innovations" in which these bad mortgages were compiled into complex new financial instruments - complex enough to hide their riskiness from the Wall Street giants that are now starting to go bust because of them.

Sure, yeah, George Bush isn't 100% to blame for all of this. Alan Greenspan, for one, deserves a lot of credit (and even he said over the weekend that this is the greatest financial crisis faced by America since the end of World War II). Certainly in general, the culprit is the broader Republican philosophy that all market regulation is bad (which, ironically, may well lead in this case to massive government intervention into the economy). But sure, I'd put Mr. Bush and his administration over the 50% mark for culpability here.