Dana Bash and two minutes of total bullshit

Even by McCNN's standards, this report from Dana Bash is gag-and-vomit-level fetid runny sulfurous bullshit. Every major point in it is bullshit, including the headline.

First, Bash says McCain's plan is to buy toxic mortgages from homeowners. Neat trick, that. Homeowners don't own mortgages; the lenders do. This small sleight of hand is hard to explain without imputing the malign intent to hide the fact that McCain is proposing a gift of $300 billion to the exact people who made the stupid, bad, dangerous loans - or at least to the fools who bought them. This is nothing short of paying off the profiteers who, of all the people who contributed to this clusterfuck, are the ones who should have the most knowledge of risk and for whom market punishment is most appropriate.

Then, Bash attributes this plan to liberals! She shows a clip of Hillary Clinton that purports to show Clinton proposing the same thing. But it doesn't. Not even close. Hillary advocates instead that bankruptcy judges be empowered to rewrite loan terms, not to bail out lenders. In fact, Hillary's proposal, which is a mainstream Democratic proposal, leaves some of the right people holding the bag they very much deserve to hold.

Last, Bash brings on Penelope Patsuris for no apparent reason, and Patsuris makes some vapid point about how many mortgages $300 billion would buy if we Americans were stupid enough to elect the economically clueless John McCain. She can't even come up with an estimate, but she can ask rhetorically whether Henry Paulson is going to inspect every one of them. Uh, Penelope, how does $300 billion make that a harder problem than $700 billion?

Seriously, these people think we all have the IQ of a century-old chestnut stump - combined.

Bash has a nice voice, but I'd fire her ass and let her look for a graveyard shift AM DJ job. I'd fire her with no notice and no severance and no bullshit politesse, as in clean your fucking desk out in the next 10 minutes under supervision of security and don't ever darken my door or ask for a reference. I don't care whether she's dishonest or just stupidly incompetent (though I'd bet on dishonest). I'd fire her producer's ass, too.

There is no excuse for this disgraceful tissue of lies.