That WSJ opinion piece is a load of elitist crap. (And will you ever learn the difference between opinion and factual reporting?)

The angst is also hard to fathom given that Americans are richer than they've ever been before. Household wealth recently hit $44.4 trillion, an all-time high. A big part of that is due to the stock market's 35% recovery last year, as well as rising property prices. OK, not everyone is convinced that the real estate market will hold up, and we're also concerned that price signals are warning that Federal Reserve policy has been too accommodating. Nevertheless, when a record 68.6% of households own their own homes, that should at least create a feeling of security.

What percent of working Americans have any stake in the stock market? How does that effect their personal household "wealth", other than to bury it in a statistic?

Of those alleged 68.6% of American homes "owned" by their residents, what fraction are actually owned by mortgage-holders -including your own, I daresay - and what percentage of those households will declare bankruptcy and/or default (and lose those homes they allegedly "own" to foreclosure) in this calendar year?

That leaves the inescapable conclusion that the problem is perception. This pessimism is understandably fed by Democrats who want to retake the White House. But it's also flogged by a media that can't seem to admit that the real news of the past three years is how well the U.S. economy has weathered the shocks of a huge stock-market blowoff, September 11, business scandals and the long prelude to war in Iraq.

This is supposed to assuage the American public? "It coulda been worse"????

After 11 months of unemployment I've finally got a job: for minimum wage, in a tobacco store, raking in the state's mark-up in the process - a.k.a. making money from addiction, no better than a crack or heroin pusher - and the people I sell to are not seeing the "robust economy" any more clearly than they are seeing Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction".

When will you (Tom, at least) awaken to the possibility that these claims are just more of Bush's vaporware? (Or are you so enamored of the smell of lanolin that you can't bear the thought of the wool being removed from your eyes?)

The rest of your post, Tom, illustrates precisely what you proclaim to rail against: you exacerbate the "fog" of war to obscure the complete failure, foreign and domestic, of the worst president this nation has inflicted upon itself in (at least) the last 104 years.

My call? Kerry would pull out of Iraq so fast we'd leave afterimages of tanks behind.

Nixon left behind the actual tanks - and your point is...?