Loosening up money for this ‘sucker’
Language opens a window on the mind of the speaker.
So when President George W. Bush warned conferees of both parties yesterday that if they didn’t approve his proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street “this sucker could go down” he just about summed up the class, intelligence and leadership he has brought to the White House these past eight years.
“This sucker could go down,” meaning the democratic capitalist system upon which we have staked our lives. This intricate, noble idea in his mind is a “sucker” that could fail “if money isn’t loosened up.” Loosened up from us, the very people whose pockets he had licensed Wall Street to pick.
The man who insisted on cutting the taxes of the wealthy, who pushed an “ownership society” in the face of reasonable doubt that we were reaching the limits of rational credit, was now proposing what could become a $3,200 levy on each and every one of us to rescue the greedy rich.
And he could find no more enlightened way to explain our plight than to resort to tired macho clichés. He had asked us again and again to believe in a free market society that he was now describing as a sinking sucker. This was George Bush once again rising to a crisis.
Historians of the future will use this quote from the waning days of his administration to take stock of the man, and the picture won’t be pretty. We certainly don’t struggle to send our children to college so that they can describe our society as a sucker and its citizenry people from whom money must be loosened.—DM
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