Gerald you called it as it is but I feel it may be rhetoric. I say that as gently as possible with no malice to you or any one else.
I remember back in the late 60's the first time I heard the term "Creative Financing" it struck me as ominous and I got the feeling it would catch on fire and burn a lot of people but I had no idea it turn in to an explosion of this magnitude.
The old adage "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't" always comes back to haunt us.
This will always be Bushes stigma just like Hoover 80 years ago (also a Republican) (hmn...maybe something to that after all) got blamed for the "Great Depression" that was ready to happen when he took office. His problem was in how to put and end to it.
I feel it's all kinda like so many other things as time goes buy and new generations come into power. Few were good History students and so they make the same mistakes over & over again with just have enough different look and feel about it to be deceiving.
In this country we defeated may virus's, totally eradicated some so we thought. Then we dropped our guard. Some came back and some others mutated and came back.
What are you going to do? We fix a problem and it gets forgotten so no one watches the door any more. Leaving History to repeat it's self.
I am not a Bible pusher but I have read it thru & thru (heck of a good History book) and there is a passage in it "There is nothing new under the sun" that sums it up.
When I was a teen ager I thought I was really hip and cool when I got my first pair of "White Buck" shoes until an Aunt showed me an ad in a Nat Geo magazine for "White Bucks" 20 years earlier. Sure did bust my bubble but taught me a lesson.