The next few days are going to be one of those periods during which celebrities pronounce on the issues of our day with all the emotion and amateurism they can muster. Whoopi Goldberg has been hired by ABC and Barbara Walters to be a professional controversialist on The View, but her latest article for the women’s blog Wow-O-Wow.com reveals an unkempt garden of musings:
I find it extraordinary as I listen to folks talk about the free-market system that they don’t recognize that the free-market system is truly broken and beyond repair so that we have to start all over again. I think Barack Obama sees this, and so I am very, very pleasantly surprised at his determination to fix something that is not of his making. As President Bush sails away into the sunset leaving us with a trillion-dollar debt, I think to myself, “I’m glad it’s Barack Obama, because at least he’s got a different way of looking at it.” He seems to be very realistic, he seems to have an idea of who we are as Americans and how we can, as individuals, take hold of this country and bring it to the place we want it to be. This is very exciting to me.
…I will simply point out that eight years ago, we had money. Eight years later, we’re a trillion dollars in debt. Now, that’s not all President Bush, but some of it is him — quite a bit of it is his fault, actually. Not all of it; a lot of it is these people who just got greedy and piggish, and started to do silly things, lending money to people who had no way of paying it back and only thinking of themselves and their pockets.
Goldberg is entirely ignorant of the actual national debt numbers: The debt was $5.7 trillion when Bush took office in 2001 and now stands around $10 trillion. She did seem to understand that she did not really understand on the economy and the credit crunch:
It was explained to me; I don’t think I could explain it to you righteously, but it made sense when I heard the explanation. Basically, the bank is sitting because they’re not below what their paperwork should say and they’re not above what their paperwork should say — they’re right at their paperwork mark and they don’t want to move from that.
What?