Five Aces In The Hole

Just to make sure we don't lose sight of just whose scandal the Wall Street Meltdown truly is, another opening moment of reiteration:

However the policy side of this mess turns out, the political side has been needlessly and irretrievably lost, to the extent that I can't help it.  A pity that extent is so gapingly large.

Here's a Donk "winter holiday" ornament I haven't gotten around to mentioning.  Boy, won't ACORN be happy if they open up THEIR present under the federal "tree":

Just heard from several readers that Lindsay Grahamnesty told Fox that the Mother of All Bailouts includes a reported $100 million more in funding for the left-wing housing entitlement thugs and heavily tax-subsidized fraudsters at ACORN. Under the original bailout proposal, apparently, a large portion of any repayment of the $700 billion would go to Barack Obama’s good friends at ACORN with a smaller allocation to debt repayment. Readers heard him say it was 20%.

Double M has a lot more about Barack Obama's old friends here, here, and here, and Ensign Ed contributes this morsel.  Suffice it to say, ACORN is the moral equivalent of al Qaeda minus the truck bombs, box cutters, and head-diapers.

Yet Mr. Morrissey still attributes this Donk poison pill to....ignorance?:

That being said, this section proves that the Democrats in Congress have learned nothing from this financial collapse.  They still want to game the market to pick winners and losers by funding programs for unqualified and marginally-qualified borrowers to buy houses they may not be able to afford — and that’s the innocent explanation for this clause.

The real purpose of section D is to send more funds to La Raza and ACORN through housing welfare, via the slush fund of the HTF.  They want to float their political efforts on behalf of Democrats with public money, which was always the purpose behind the HTF.  They did the same thing in April in the first bailout bill, setting aside $100 million in “counseling” that went in large part to ACORN and La Raza, and at least in the former case, providing taxpayer funding for a group facing criminal charges in more than a dozen states for fraud.

Saying the Democrats have learned nothing from the Wall Street Meltdown assumes that they merely blundered into it.  I think they knew exactly what they were doing from the very beginning a decade ago: outsourcing a welfare program to the private sector during the era of Republican control secure in the knowledge that when their unfunded mandate finally bankrupted the mortgage industry, they could blame the victims and end up swallowing them whole on behalf of the defaulters Dems used to set them up and be credited with "saving the financial sector" AND the housing market at the same time.  Throwing in this ACORN clause just keeps that gravy train rolling under a different name, and in the meantime serves as a huge disincentive for the House GOP support for a "compromise" bill the Dems claim they have to have to achieve it.  And if worse comes to worse, they can always forego it as a frivilous concession that won't change the core socialisticality of the b[uy]out one jot or tittle.

Ditto Ali-Dickbar Al-Durbini's pet amendment that would empower federal bankruptcy judges to unilaterally and arbitrarily rewrite mortgage contracts for the benefit of poor borrowers who can't repay them (via Beldar and Althouse).

Pop quiz: what effect would that definitional uncertainty have on mortgage lenders?  That's right, it'd make them less likely to offer high-risk loans (if the feds gave them a choice) and more likely to jack up mortgage interest rates for ALL prospective borrowers for the additional risk (if the feds kept denying them said choice).  This in the name of the same puerile "fairness" that created this mess to begin with.

I thought the idea of this bailout was to SAVE the mortgage lending business, not destroy what's left of it.  Talk about "more of the same we can't afford".

I've already conceded that there is philosphical justification for supporting some sort of "clean" bailout bill as a "breakwater for Main Street".  But aren't what conservatives remain in Congress duty-bound to fight it when festooned with deal-breakers like these that will just exacerbate and/or repeat the same mischief?  And could not preventing a "rescue" be precisely what the Democrats have in mind?

Double-H seems to be admitting that the Dems have us bent over a barrel but we just have no choice but to relax and "enjoy" the buggering.  That's certainly the mindset the Dems themselves are encouraging:

“I didn’t know I was going to be the referee for an internal G.O.P. ideological civil war,” Mr. Frank said, according to The A.P.Thursday, in the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

It gets tiresome to have to replow the same ground time and again, even for me, but let's go through this once more: the Democrats are in the majority in the House of Representatives.  The minority in the House - i.e. the GOP - is powerless.  They can't get their alternative bill passed and they can't stop the majority from doing anything.  If Crazy Nancy wants to pass the Donk/Paulson b[uy]out with all these poison pill amendments attached, she can do so any time she wants.  So why doesn't she?

1) The public doesn't want it, and Pelosi doesn't want to buck that solo for fear of endangering all the "blue dog" freshmen that got elected in 2006 in Republican-leaning districts; and 

2) If she can make it intolerable for House Pachyderms to hold their nose and vote for this monstrosity, string this process out long enough, and the Dow collapses - say, on Monday morning - she can blame it all on Boehner & Co., even though they are BY DEFINITION irrelevant to it.

Hell, it's not like she and her minions aren't STILL treating their Republican "colleagues" that way (money portion comes at the end of the clip):

Understand that these meetings that were supposed to be "bipartisan" came AFTER the Dems' White House ambush of House GOPers on Thursday, which in turn only came about after John McCain unexpectedly stuck up for them and got them a seat in that meeting.  This last little nuance may help explain why the Dems were so outwardly pissed at McCain after the fact; Ensign Ed believes that without McCain's intervention, Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry, along with their Bush Administration mole Hank Paulson, would have been able to ram through their full-blown b[uy]out scheme with typical Senate RINO acquiescence before public opposition would have had a chance to coalesce.  Once the House conservative voices were unmuzzled, matters for the neoBolsheviks became a lot more complicated.

But the Dems still hold the upper hand in this standoff.  While the Boehnerites are fighting for Main Street heroically and courageously (depending upon one's point of view), the most they can hope to accomplish is to strip off Chris Dodd's and Dick Durbin's poison pills.  Their alternative - which is infinitely preferable - hasn't a chance in all the hells of ever seeing a presidential signature pen.  And they've already been plucked and potted as the patsy if everything goes south in a hurry next week.  When even the Buckleyites are no longer standing athwart history's road yelling, "STOP!", and the libertarianesque Wall Street Journal op-eders are running up the white flag, brother, the handwriting is undeniably on the, er, wall.

And what of the best case scenario, a genuine compromise that omits all the extraneous Donk mischief and at least scales down the price tag to taxpayers?  In medical terms, the patient's life will be saved, but the recovery will be long and hard.  I could almost call John McCain's political collapse last week a relief for all it means of the Dems getting sole responsibility for the lean times to come, but for the great likelihood of their administering a "relapse" that might indeed be lethal before "help" can arrive.

But then if the Dems get the economic collapse they're holding out for, the patient will be DOA a lot sooner - and two-party democracy in America right along with it.