web

web, originally uploaded by pr9000.

The spiders have been out in full force the past week or two; if you go to my Flickr page, you'll see a particularly ugly one that's been perched in our front yard for a few days. I thought it was a brown recluse, but I think I'm wrong. It's not a black widow; that's of little consolation. I'm starting to think we moved to the wrong state. Alaska, I'm guessing, doesn't have a lot of nasty bugs.

And do you ever wonder why the sight of a spider makes us recoil? Feel things crawling up our legs when it's just our imagination? Claim you can hear them screeching as they apply warpaint to their faces, ready to chomp on your neck in the middle of the night? And why do I think they have faces? Seriously, I worry about myself sometimes.

I'd rather contemplate the gorgeous webs that the smaller spiders leave, particularly in the bushes along our sidewalk. After a rain (or, in this case, judicious application of the sprinkler system) webs are majestic, the water like little snowglobes, the spiders off somewhere muttering "Rosebud" for nobody to hear ...

***

This picture seems appropriate today of all days; I've been nervous since before sunrise about getting trapped in the mess of a web Wall Street has spun ... or is it "spinned?" (Someone get back to me on that, please) Since the last bubble burst, I've acquired a mortgage and a 401(k). Back in the late 90s, I felt insulated from the insanity -- partly because I never invested in silly stocks like e-shoehorns.com ("We've revolutionized the art of putting on a shoe"), but mainly because I didn't make enough money to afford e-shoehorns.com common tender. I remember being at a wedding shower in late 2000, and the entirety of the male small talk was: stock tips, hot women and golf. I felt completely out of the loop, and remember wondering if I was ever going to grow up and care about this kind of stuff.

Well, one massive financial system meltdown later, I know why grown ups drink Pepto straight from the bottle.

What depresses me most: the blame being slung (slinged? "Slung" sounds better but again, let me know if I'm wrong here) by the usual partisan suspects, and the accompanying nonchalance about the results if, as seems likely, Congress won't approve the bailout plan Bush is proposing. I keep returning to the description of what almost happened last week -- the credit markets almost "seized up" and failed to function. To me, "seizing up" reminds me of (1) car engines, and (2) recipes. I've had both happen to me (the former was a Buick Century, the latter most recently was a chocolate fondue) and in both cases, the results weren't good.

I'm not an economist; allegedly, I have an undergraduate degree at least tangentially concerning economics, though the extent of it was praying that I'd pass micro and writing a 20 page paper on Thorstein Veblen. I bet he'd have a field day with the past 15 years, though he'd probably be posting his thoughts on the Huffington Report and doing segments with Keith Olbermann, and I'd hate him with the power of a thousand suns because of it.

So, as "not an economist," my analysis of the situation is ... well, somewhere between "laughable" and "fark.com" but the part I keep getting back to is this:

If President Bush hadn't done such a masterful job of being a divider, not a uniter ... and had not forced Iraq on a Congress that was all too ready to roll over for him ... and had campaigned in 2004 with just a touch more grace and a lot less ballbusting demonize-the-opponent old school politics ... and had been a little more in touch with the disaster that was Katrina (even though most fault truly lies with Ray Nagin and whoever Louisiana's governor was) ... and hadn't spent federal funds like a drunken sailor on shore leave ... and had announced Rumsfeld's resignation before the midterms in 2006, thus blowing a chance to show that he thinks himself capable of making mistakes ...

In short, if Bush hadn't burned through every ounce of goodwill over the past eight years, he could have approached Congress with this very same bailout plan and had it received with more thoughtfulness and seriousness. The administration's actions to this point make everyone (on both sides of the aisle) say "Hell no, we're not rubberstamping this" -- thus leading the market to worry that maybe Bernake and Paulsen aren't coming to the rescue, thus making the situation that much more toxic, dangerous and potentially devastating.

I wasn't ready to say it after Iraq turned ugly. I wasn't ready to say it after Harriet Miers. I wasn't ready to say it after Katrina. I certainly didn't think I'd have to say it after he took a political risk and backed "the Surge" and turned out to be right, against all odds.

But I'm ready to say it now: on the whole, George W. Bush's presidency has been a disaster. Which is not to say that his team didn't do some important, great things (North Korea, the aforementioned Surge, fighting AIDS in the developing world, leading the humanitarian response to the tsunami), and which also is not to say that history won't judge him better than we do now.

Good leaders lead. They consult, they cajole, they convince, and at the end of the day they lead their people. George W. Bush has done none of this, and now, when the country is facing a crisis that is as unpredictable as it is dangerous, we're all reaping what his administration has sowed.