How Is it that the Wall Street Journal Editors Have Absolutely No Memory of the Last 8 Years?

Eight years later, when Bill Clinton handed the keys to Sonny Bush he hande him a $231 billion budget surplus -- the greatest surplus in U.S. History.

Not only did those damn Clinton liberals manage a budget surplus but were at the same time able to pay down the national debt by a staggering 2.4 trillion.

Within two years the budget surpluses were gone, and the national debt was on it's way back up as the Bushies began borrowing again to make ends meet. By the time they left office they'd add another $5 trillion to the national debt.

Then, once the seed corn was gone, the Bushies started to borrow and spend and cut taxes too boot since, to quote Dick Cheney, "deficits don't matter." Suddenly now, the WSJ editors and their  dwindling army of dittoheads are all atwitter over "Obama's mounting deficits."

Then there's the cost of Bush-era deregulation. Those expenses all came due just as George W. Bush was hightailing it out of Dodge last January -- just in the nick of time. The full cost of failing (or just plain refusing) to police corporate America, especially the financial services sector, has already cost us trillions of dollars, and the full cost may not be known for a decade. because all those chickens haven't come home to roost yet. But they're on their way.

Not to pile on but, then there's the cost of all the environmental degradation that occurred on their watch. Instead of addressing the mounting evidence they took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, first using phony science  to deny global warming was even happening. Then, once it became impossible to deny it any longer, they changed their argument to "Sure, but there's no proof than human activities have anything to do with global warming." It was an argument designed to preclude even trying to do anything about global warming, and it worked. (Unfortunately we can't sue them like we did Big Tobacco.)

Then there's the war in Iraq. That little mistake cost us $12 billion a month for more than five of Bush's eight years in office -- in all nearly a trillion bucks down a sandy rat hole, and counting.

In Afghanistan they spent a small fortune unseating the Taliban and trying to kill or capture the actual people who planned the 9-11 attacks. On the very verge of success though the Bushies lost interest,  turning their attention to Iraq before they achieved those goals in Afghanistan. In the end all the billions of dollars, (and hundreds of  US soldier's lives) spent in Afghanistan achieved nothing. All they did was  allow the Taliban and al Qaida to infect neighboring Pakistan, regroup and re-engage in Afghanistan, where they now control most of the country once again. Hundreds of billions of dollars down the drain there too, and also, still counting.

All that money the Bush administration spent, wasted, misappropriated, and, in the end, what did we get for those trillions? Well, we  got partial ownership of Iraq, full ownership of Afghanistan, and a growing ownership share in nuclear-armed, Taliban/al Qaida infested Pakistan.