December’s unemployment rate hit a 16 year high, but the total job losses in 2008 go back much further. Per the NY Times:

The 7.2 percent was the highest unemployment rate since January 1993, when the country was still shaking off a jobless recovery from the 1990-91 recession. The loss in total jobs for 2008 was the largest since 1945.

So the unemployment rate matches what the elder Bush handed to Bill Clinton. But Junior Bush will best his Daddy’s efforts with an economic hangover that will make things worse still. With the economy still in freefall, reversing that momentum means Obama’s early efforts will be to apply the brakes and to hope, within his first year, to skid it to a stop.

I’ve noted before that historically, housing bubble collapses don’t create V-shaped rebounds. They create U-shaped bounces, because the excess of vacant and unbought homes has to be bought up and occupied before home prices rise again.

Junior Bush has spent much of his adult life trying to outdo his Dad. It’s part of what drives him psychologically. And he’s done so this time by excelling at destroying a huge economy. If there is karmic justice, the knowledge of his spectacular failure will eat at his mind and soul for the rest of his life.

He won’t outdo Hoover, mainly because of the changes made in counting things on the misery index, most notably, not counting people if they’ve been unemployed for over a year. But I still expect to see 12% to 15% unemployment rates within the next 18 months which will clearly break every low economic hurdle except the Great Depression. Maybe folks will remember that for another half century before falling for the charlatans of faux conservatism again.

George W. Bush conserved nothing. He’s had more civilian casualties lost to foreign attackers than we’ve had since the Revolutionary War. And more citizens lost to natural disaster than any president in nearly 70 years. More troops have died under his command than the past five presidents combined lost. He broke all the previous bounds of torture, going back to slavery days. He’s cost us more money than any other President, by FAR. And only one president left us in worse shape economically over the past 220 years.

That’s quite a record of losses and failures.

So remind me, why does he get a pension and a library from us still? Some traditions beg to be broken and if Congress lacks the gumption to set aside those perks, we’re stuck with hoping some motivated monkeywrenchers will build in flaws that cause the library to be demolished within a very few years.

Junior Bush never could carry his Daddy’s jockstrap, nor could that ever stretch large enough to contain the far greater ass that is Junior.