Bush v. Gore and the Great Recession

Two days after Bill Fleckenstein's misguided rant about Paul Krugman and as if to indirectly respond to and successfully demolish it (the rant), the latter produced a great column in today's New York Times.

Krugman basically tells us that, would Bush v. Gore have gone the other way in 2000, a lot of things would assuredly have been different but probably not the financial crisis. The seeds for the Great Recession of 2008 were already planted. The Democrats would've been blamed for it instead of the Republicans, that's all. Case in point: the UK, where the labor party in power the past 10 years embraced deregulation just as lovingly as the Democrats under Clinton and the Republicans under Bush and is now getting blamed big time by the British electorate. The Tories are almost assured to return to power in the back of an unprecedented wave of discontent, a prospect Paul Krugman finds appalling, but that's another story.