The Tiffany's of historians

If it looks like a bribe, it probably is. With Newt Gingrich (R-money-grubbing), who's spent his entire career in corrupt self-enrichment, that probability is even higher, approaching one. Freddie Mac paid him more than $1.6 million as a historian? You've got to be kidding me. Here's a guy who couldn't get tenure at a third-rate rural state college (for which I'm sure he blames liberals, but which I regard as proof the tenure system can work).

Gingrich "explains" this obvious influence-peddling gig:

“I offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do,” he said at the debate. “My advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, ‘We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that’s what the government wants us to do.’ As I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.”

What a load of bullshit! He even walked back the lie the next day:

“I have no idea what the dates were,” he said, according to the Web site. “I offered strategic advice over a period of time. I did no lobbying of any kind. And I’m very happy to offer people strategic advice if they come and ask my advice.”

He's simply manufacturing lies to cover his corpulent ass. It's a lot easier to give glib answers if you can just make shit up. Hired historians don't get to make policy recommendations. They don't even meet the leadership.

Gingrich claims Freddie Mac needed his strategic advice and, lo and behold, that advice perfectly anticipated today's Republican claim that private lenders making the bad "innovative" loans couldn't possibly be at fault - since the market is purr-fect - so it had to be 30-year-old anti-redlining law that caused the meltdown. Yet now he doesn't know whether he gave that advice before or after the meltdown.

Even beforehand, the advice would have been worthless in wingnut fantasy land. If the big bad government was really forcing bad loans, Freddie would have been fully aware of that fact - and of Newt's inability, as a historian, to change it. Unless of course he was lobbying...

Gringrich is a sociopathic pig grown fat at the right-wing hog trough. At least Michele Bachmann has principles.

Monkey business

Follow me, said John McCain.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis’s role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

McCain must have forgotten Gary Hart's campaign self-immolation twenty years ago.

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

And:

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections.

Exactly the kind of payday for who you know, not what you know, that looks to normal non-Washington people totally like bribery.

The cherry on top of the bullshit sundae: McCain has been flaying Obama for ties to the river of dirty debt.