I was embarrassed during the 2000 campaign when the Democrats kept harping on the soaring DOW, which to the average person means very little since the books are always cooked to suit the whims of the time. The millions of modest stockholders that politicians are always heralding possess a piece of the action by pensions mainly in mutual funds which seem never to rise or fall very much. There are scandals, of course, where a corrupt company cajole employees to invest in their employer, such as Enron. I was also ticked that Gore and the Democrats had forgotten the stunning quote “irrational exuberance” put forth several years before by the Federal Reserve. Rubinomics, too, had misled the voter with the phony projection of surpluses, even though we still had a five trillion dollar debt, most of which makes the nation beholden to foreigners.

Another embarrassment was constant reminder of the twenty some-odd million jobs created during the Clinton years. This was the very same bird that parroted the seventeen million jobs Reagan created during his reign. Neither mentioned that in the main these were very low paying jobs to absorb the loss of manufacturing jobs crossing the borders or heading overseas. Voters are fish that can be counted on to take the bait and thrown onto the grill fired by cooked books.

Surely, Bush is a master of cooking the books. He as governor and Paige as Houston superintendent of schools had done a masterly job in forging school records to make the “miracle of Texas” a winning slogan for his run in 2000. As president he and the defense department cooked the book of war and deceived the tired fish swimming upstream for their dear lives. Once successful he got his Wall Street cronies together to announce, except for jobs, the biggest quarter growth in history because of the vested interest in furthering the tax stampede that will eventuate untold grief when foreign investors own the country.