United States President 
Nov 13, 2008 04:05 PM
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Tue Feb 9
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United States President George W. Bush gave a speech today about the perilous financial crisis that threatens to plunge our nation into a prolonged recession from hell. As you'll see when you click to watch this skillful video compilation, Mr. Bush has a genetic inability to deliver a single god damn sentence containing Very Serious News without adding his stupid smirk at the end. In and of itself it's sort of a tragicomic statement on the nature of the last eight years. But it's much scarier when you consider the reality of our situation: we don't really even have a president right now.
Obama's people have been repeating the mantra "One president at a time" over and over, like some sort of magic political talisman. Barack has no desire to get too involved at the moment, because politically that would mean taking on lot of responsibility without technically having any power.
And Bush is just sleepwalking through his last few months. He's not just a lame duck, he's a lame duck who everyone despises. He couldn't get anything accomplished even if he wanted to. Which he doesn't. He wants to play with Barney and keep quiet enough to maybe land that Commissioner of Baseball gig a few years down the line.
Neither of those things would be all that bad if we weren't mired in a financial crisis of epic proportions. Because when a crisis happens somebody has to be in charge. And if Bush isn't, and Barack isn't, you know who is? Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson! John Crudele has already taken to referring to him as "de facto president of the US." Which is not too far off the mark!
And hey, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have a guy like Paulson in charge of all the most important decisions, considering they're in his field of expertise? Psht! This is the same guy whose original idea for solving this mess was to give all power to the Treasury to do whatever it wanted, with no challenges permitted. Paulson changed the focus of the bailout package for the third time yesterday. Third time! It doesn't inspire confidence, nor should it.
In conclusion, our fake-elected bad president has no desire or incentive to do anything. Our actual president-elect: the same, until January. Our de facto president is incentivized and predisposed to focus solely on helping Wall Street. And everyone's money is disappearing in the meantime. Also, Iran.
Hope nothing bad happens for the next three months!
Send an email to Hamilton Nolan, the author of this post, at Hamilton@gawker.com.
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