Politics and Culture

Do you think that if Bush had caused people to lose a good chunk of their current money and future savings because of his policies and then said that it was a "good time to invest" that Obama would have called him "callous?" Remember when Obama criticized McCain for saying that the "fundamentals of the economy" were strong (well, they were strong)?

And then blaming Bush for driving the markets down when much of it has occurred directly after one of his administration's boneheaded policy announcements?

And, financial advice from a guy with no experience in the private sector!

Man, you gotta have cojones.

here

The Dow plunged Monday to its lowest level in 12 years.

"What you're now seeing is a profit and earnings ratios get to the point that buying stocks is a good thing if you have a long-term perspective on it," he said to reporters after meeting in the Oval Office with visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The president compared the market to daily tracking polls used by politicians, saying that paying too close attention to Wall Street's "fits and starts" could lead to bad long-term policy.

"The stock market is story of like a tracking poll in politics. It bobs up and down day-to-day," Obama said. "And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you're probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong."

Obama said he is not measuring policies against "the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market," but by whether lending is flowing more freely, businesses are investing and the unemployed are going back to work.

He said he is "absolutely confident" that those things will happen. But the president also said it will take time fore the mistakes of the past to work their way through the system.

"There are a lot of losses that are working their way through the system and it's not surprising the market is hurting as a consequence," he said. "We dug a very deep hole for ourselves. There were a lot of bad decisions that were made. We are cleaning up that mess. It's going to be sort of full of fits and starts, in terms of getting the mess cleaned up, but it's going to get cleaned up. And we are going to recover, and we are going to emerge more prosperous, more unified, and I think more protected from systemic risk."

This man has no idea wha he's talking about.

S/T to Perfunction via corner for the video.