Iraq and bankruptcy.
Good questions here from John Galt. I'd note that bin Laden's smirking vow to bankrupt us came more than a year into the Iraq war, once it was obvious to all that things didn't go as "planned."
If the war had been carried out as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as Rumsfeld-Cheney had claimed, bin Laden surely would have moved on to find something else to crow about. But because it became a costly quagmire that Cheney-Rumsfeld claimed was a central front in the war on terror, bin Laden could claim that the jihadist movement would ultimately bankrupt us, at least in part because we would fight hard rather than fight smart.
So when I write that the President has "been Osama's best friend, wasting American resources in a futile effort to get the world to bend to our will," I'm saying that he got reckless in the wake of 9/11, despite his honorable intentions. I believe, from my experiences with the Muslim world, that more jihadist recruits were created via the Iraq war than would have been the case had we focused on careful police work in Afghanistan.
Isn't it astounding that Bush is leaving in one day, without having found bin Laden, dead or alive, after his supporters mocked Clinton after 9/11 for not catching bin Laden? I'd say some of the Iraq money should have been spent on finding him, and the rest should have gone to lowering our deficit, in order to help keep your taxes low.
Rob, I'm frustrated that we haven't captured or killed bin Laden, but I don't think it's fair to compare Bush and Clinton here. Osama bin Laden wasn't on the run during the Clinton administration in the same way he's been since 9/11. He was a relatively easy target in the 1990s; in fact, Clinton had several opportunities to kill bin Laden, but he punted every time.
Bankruptcy is the most painful part in running up the business. The worst was, no matter how much you try to repel from it, it seems that situation doesn’t get any better. Unfortunately this is what happened to those, which were not able to cope up with the difficulty that the company had been going through. The GM dealer-closing list has over 1,000 dealerships on it slated to shut, as General Motors is drastically scaling back to get their house in order. The Chrysler dealerships closing list was also a long one and the company has filed for bankruptcy protection. Both companies received large low interest loans from the government, and began restructuring in order to return the companies to financial health and competitive status in the market. Dealers are lamenting the move, and experts say that nothing, including the GM dealer closing list, will solve GM's problems with needing debt relief.