Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney (who personally is on the Save-My-Legacy tour) had an opportunity to deal with the crisis General Motors is now in, but may not have had the guts to do what needed to be done.
The Dick Cheney Save-My-Legacy tour scheduled a recent stop with Fox News to go On The Recordwith increasingly conservative host Greta Van Susteren.
CHENEY: Well, I thought that, eventually, the right outcome was going to be bankruptcy. … And the president decided that he did not want to be the one who pulled the plug just before he left office.
VAN SUSTEREN: Why?
CHENEY: Well, I think he felt, you know, these are big issues and he wouldn’t be there through the process of managing it, but in effect, would have sort of pulled the plug on GM and that was one of the first crises the new administration would have to deal with. So he put together a package that tided GM over until the new administration had a chance to look at it, decide what they wanted to do.
VAN SUSTEREN: But it’s cost us billions to get — I mean, you know —
CHENEY: It has. … And now the government owns a big chunk of General Motors. That bothers me. I don’t like having government own those kinds of major financial enterprises. I think it’s — it does damage to our long-term economic prospects when we get government involved in making those kinds of decisions.
In other words: Bush-Cheney punked out to avoid another stain on its already-tarnished legacy.
Said former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum:
SANTORUM: President Bush blew it. You know, he went out and convinced the Congress to give him a bunch of money to save the financial sector and then decided to take a little piece of that and give it to General Motors and Chrysler. Why? He punted. He basically said, I don’t want this failure to be on my watch. I want to let Obama deal with it.And we all knew at the time that letting Obama deal with it means the government’s going to come in and run the show, and that’s exactly what’s happened.
What is even more sad is how Cheney wanted nothing to do with solving the problem with GM and the auto industry in genera. Then he says, “And now the government owns a big chunk of General Motors. That bothers me.”
It doesn’t bother you nearly as much as things you and your administration were responsible for during the prior eight years. Perhaps if Cheney and Bush had the guts to deal with these issues earlier then we would not be in the mess we’re in right now.
It’s easy to criticize someone else for missing the last big shot. But, it’s shameful to do so when you passed the ball because you were too much of a coward to actually take it.
Check out the entire Think Progress story. It’s some compelling stuff.
Think Progress:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/03/cheney-bush-gm/
