President Bush: People are asking, 'Why are you helping Wall Street?'

Three days after he signed the $700-billion legislation intended to help the nation out of its credit crisis, President Bush tried today to deal with the angry criticism that came so close to scuttling it -- and continued to ripple over the weekend.

"A lot of people here in Texas and around the country are not pleased with the government having to take the steps they took," the president said, after meeting in private with a group of small-business people at a pharmacy in San Antonio, who then trooped out onto the street to provide the photo-op backdrop.

What's bugging people is this, he said: "I pay my bills, I pay my mortgage, why -- why are you helping Wall Street?"

He continued: "And the answer is because had we not done anything, people like the folks behind me would be a lot worse off.

"We'll make sure," he said, "as time goes on this doesn't happen again. In the meantime, we've got to solve the problem."

As for the turmoil on Wall Street itself on the first day of business after the legislation was enacted and signed? The president was silent.

-- James Gerstenzang

Photo credit: Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images

Comments

[Jeffrey Allen Miller NY]

Can't wait for the (censored) dictator to crawl back to Texas where he belongs.

[Mckenzie Richards]

I too am wondering why we handed Wall St nationalized Welfare. For this administration who is so in favor of privatizing everything from Social Security to medicare one wonders at the oxymoronic behavior of the present administration... or perhaps it is simply their final nail in the coffin of our country, because it definitely appears to be their agenda to destroy this country and they know the only way to do it is with the ROT from within. Apparently they consider the only good welfare is for the rich... ummm, interesting notion, but there is always the trickle-down for the poor and middle class. One could wonder why the bailout didn't start with the bottom of the financial crisis, where the underpinnings of the problems lie, the housing market. My thought would be, perhaps stabilizing the housing market and allowing it to work its way up to firm up the financials would have been a better way to go. But what do I know... apparently, watching the markets today, as much as Paulson and Bush.

For Bush to fatuously comment on how 'it would be far worse if they did nothing', my question is, how would he know? Over the past eight years he has managed to be wrong about everything, terribly unreliable about telling the truth and vacuously uninterested in almost everything of national importance. Why is anyone still listening to Bush? Why is anyone still treating him with deference? I consider him a criminal, he should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, against the Constitution and Bill of Rights, for criminal behavior against the People of the US. He should have been evicted from the WH years ago, taken out in handcuffs and impeached.
Yet this congress have once again allowed themselves to be stampeded by Bush & Co and have jumped off the cliff, dragging all of us with them and quite frankly, I resent it.

But that's just the View from My Trailer Park and apparently only the rich get to vote.
Thank you.
MJ Richards

[Stacy]

I guess one plus about this Texas moron is who will go down as the worse and most unpopular president in history is others will learn on how not to run a country in to the ground.

[sm]

"We'll make sure ,,, this doesn't happen again."

It should not have happened at all. 8 years late, trillions of dollars short.

Heckuva a job g-dub.

[bkmur@msn]

GWB is an unwitting species traitor by revealling to us lower life forms more than a glimpse of the the hidden continents of high finance. We worker bees breathe the same air as this hidden caste. We can even interbreed with them in times of biological crisis. But we do not operate in the same causal universe. In Bush-world, hard work is for the little people and failure is not even possible for residents of the hidden continent. Through his crisis management leadership style, Bush has revealled more of this stark reality than he was supposed to. Just for that his Presidential Library will no longer be lined in gold. This amounts to high shame on the hidden continent.