National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002

I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

President George W. Bush, September 1, 2005

I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it…

Vice President Dick Cheney, June 19, 2006

I guess if I look back on it now, I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we have encountered [in Iraq].

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, September 1, 2007

Bernanke also admitted that the effects of the mortgage meltdown and subsequent credit crunch were more widespread than he had anticipated.

“In particular, the further tightening of credit conditions, if sustained, would increase the risk that the current weakness in housing could be deeper or more prolonged than previously expected, with possible adverse effects on consumer spending and the economy more generally,” Bernanke said.

Of course, any intelligent person could have foreseen all of these catastrophes, and many, many people did. Bush ignored the warnings. For example, financial experts have been telling us for years that our whole economy was being propped up by a housing bubble. Bush administration bungling has led to yet another trillion-dollar fiasco.

The U.S. economy faces its worst crisis since the 1930s, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Expectations for a quick end to the crisis are fading fast. “I think it’s going to last a lot longer than perhaps we would have anticipated,” Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox Corp., said Wednesday.

UPDATE: From Think Progress– Bush Compares The Financial Crisis He Created To The Terrorist Attacks He Never Saw Coming. “The current financial crisis is a direct result of Bushonomics and should not be dismissed as just another unanticipated tragedy.”

UPDATE: Remember “The Ownership Society”? In 2004, Bush was so proud of the sub-prime mortgage housing bubble that he campaigned on it as the middle class went into debt up to their eyeballs.

UPDATE: Did The Onion get it right in 2001 or what? Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.’

UPDATE: I really thought the Bush administration was doing their best to make sure the credit collapse wouldn’t happen until after they left office. Well, that didn’t work. So they are doing what they always do, telling us that their “solution” to the fiasco they led the country into is the only option and must be implemented immediately, and without any debate. This is not the first time they’ve pulled this, as Glenn Greenwald notes. Why do the Democrats go along with it?