Monday, October 17, 2011

Enemies of the state

Democrats may be learning disabled where it comes to the politics of governance. But Republicans spend their entire lives in denial of reality:

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

4 comments:

flymorgue2 said...

Don't forget Acorn sit ins - the fat rumpled lisper could not have done it himself, as he was too busy collecting Wall St money

lovable liberal said...

ACORN sit-ins? What fever swamp did this ooze out of?

Frank won his reelection easily - not easily by his usual standard but still easily.

flymorgue2 said...

Can't swing a dead cat in Newton without hittin a you. Measure of Frank's (continuing) complicity will have to come from more reliablemmeasures.

lovable liberal said...

Did that garble have a point in it?