Excuse me, Shrub? You're calling the 90s an "economic binge?" I thought you were a Republican, and favored economic growth and the increase in individual wealth. Now you're saying it was nothing more than a wild party that we have to suffer for.

You (or that ghastly Karl Rowe) are choosing to play politics with the stock market collapse. A Republican. A Texas bidnessman Republican. This is astonishing. Somewhere, Calvin Coolidge is crying in his scotch and soda. Good God, Shrub, you're bashing people doing well in the stock market? Just to keep fresh in everybody's mind how miserable your predessor was and how Clinton was such a baneful immoral devil that even the healthy economy that supposedly he could take no responsibility for has now been rejiggered as nothing more than a bachelor party in a seedy strip joint, and now all of us who aren't big campaign contributors have to take our medicine. Er, where's Skilling's medicine, Shrub? Where's Fastow's? Where's Bernie's?

Oh, I see. They weren't the ones who elected Clinton. That noxious, scheming, murderous, licentious scoundrel. That thieving rapist, that leering trianguist, that husband of Lilith. We, the American people, did, and now we must be punished by losing our investment savings. All that wealth creation, since it occurred simultaneously with the Presidency of the most foul President since ... well, ever, must be taken away from us.

This is beyond farce, beyond tragedy, beyond outrage. This is surreal: a Republican president is ostensibly trying to assuage the capital markets by saying, it's all right, all that wealth that has evaporated was a chimera, and immoral at that. Your 401k which is now a 101k, your portfolios, the grand experiment of the democratization of investing in the 1990s, is akin to one of the drunken binges I went on while forgetting to inform the SEC about my Harken transactions. Those trillions of dollars y'all have lost in the market? The equivalent of Bill Clinton's fondness for interns and their panties, a sordid overindulgence.

Keep your mouth shut, Shrub. Every time you open it, Americans lose more money. Someday, all these defenders of Shrub who take seriously the idea of the accumulation of individual wealth will stop making excuses for him.

It's a shame the Republicans have turned out like this, because the Democrats ... well, it's back to the class warfare, myriad and omnipresent legislation to clog up the works we've spent over twenty years trying to fix.

And Jesse's in the hospital, his political career evidently over. Boy, we need him, or someone like him, now.

I might be the closest blogger to the explosion that's just occured in Northwest DC, so here's a thumbnail sketch.

Around 2 pm this afternoon, a man was seriously injuried in an explosion in a parking garage about two blocks from me, in the 5200 block of Wisconsin Ave. The DC Chief of Police Ramsey just spoke and said that there were indications that a pipe bomb went off. The parking garage is underneath a restaurant. For those familiar with the area, Chevy Chase, the incident happened near the Mazza Galerie complex.

The whole panoply of authorities are here: police, ATF, FBI. So it was a deliberate act, evidently; from what I heard, the individual who was injured just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn't an earth-shattering explosion; I heard a muffled thud, but at first I just thought it was a car wreck on Wisconsin Avenue, which is only two blocks from me. I hear those every now and then. There was no smoke and, in fact, the police have re-opened the street up to vehicular traffic.

Still, a pipe bomb in the backyard. One thinks of the inevitable context. The weather today is similar to what it was on the 11th: pleasantly warm, no humidity, a virtually cloudless sky. That's a similarity.I compare Wisconsin Avenue right now, bubbling with activity, to the way it was on that dreadful September, when the emptiness was eerie. The shared sense of the jitters was unavoidable and proves that, in DC at least, we know we're still at war.