Bush (43) - The Great Deregulator?

"The Bush Administration's eight long years of failed deregulation policies have resulted in our nation's largest bailout ever, leaving the American taxpayers on the hook potentially for billions of dollars." This, folks, is what former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said in 2009...........................................................................................Hm, kind of matches up nicely with conventional wisdom, doesn't it; a big, bad Republican President laying the hammer down, bringing the country down with him? The only problem, of course, is that it's total bull-crap. Yep, folks, you can blame President Bush for a whole litany of things (2 unnecessary wars, out of control discretionary spending, burgeoning deficits, etc.) but deregulation flat-out just isn't one of them...........................................................................................a) The main pieces of deregulation most frequently cited; the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, were both passed and signed into law before Mr. Bush ever became President, b) the budget for financial regulation actually went up and up significantly (the SEC budget, for example, went up from 357 million to a whopping 629 million - this, according to a study by Washington University, St. Louis and George Mason University) under the fellow, c) the codes of Federal regulation actually reached an all-time high of over 75,000 pages during Bush's tenure, and d) Mr. Bush supported and signed into law, Sarbanes-Oxley, a highly REGULATORY piece of regulation. NONE of any of this points to Mr. Bush as a deregulator.....................................................................................................The bottom-line here, people, is that Mrs. Pelosi is either lying or she's an idiot. And, please, get this, too. Pelosi was actually one of the 153 House Democrats who voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley back in 1999. She frigging voted for it!...I mean, come on, does it get any better than this or what?