Missing A Golden Opportunity

Two more McCain ads on the "Wall Street Meltdown":

Great - more "crisis"mongering.  Nothing spooks people into a crisis more effectively than telling them they're already in one.  Or, put another way, if a man is convinced he's going to die tomorrow, he'll usually find a way to make it happen.  The same thing applies to going broke.

Lovely - now it is confimed that "reform" means "new rules."  As in imposed by the government that created this mess in the first place.  My, but that's reassuring.

Is "Foundation" any better?  Not really:

Way to go, Maverick!  The best way to convince voters that you're the man for the Big Chair is to ape the populist demogoguery of your opponent!  That'll REALLY reassure nervous Americans!

I know these spots are only thirty seconds long, but would it really be so difficult to add a single additional adjective to the appellation "greedy CEOs"?  That would be the term "Democrat":

It's not often that one person plays key roles in two -- count 'em, two -- trillion-dollar disasters. Welcome, my friends, to the world of well-connected Democrat Jamie Gorelick....

We're all amply familiar with the first one.  Let's take a look at the second one, shall we?

Where did Gorelick turn up next?  Though she had no training or experience in finance, Gorelick was appointed the Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae and served in the role from 1997 to 2003. During that six-year period, she earned over $26 million.

During Gorelick's tenure, FNMA suffered a $10 billion accounting scandal, an ominous harbinger of the firm's looming troubles. One of the falsified transactions helped FNMA hit earnings targets for 1998, which triggered bonuses for top executives including nearly $800,000 to Gorelick.

Put simply "Jamie Gorelick was one of the Fannie executives who benefited from inflated bonuses based on Enron-style accounting."

In 2002 Business Week interviewed Gorelick concerning the health of FNMA. She responded, "We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody's gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength -- without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions."

Less than a year later regulators "accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses."

Today, of course, FNMA is on taxpayer-funded life support, currently trading at 61 cents a share. And because it was thought to have been "managed safely" (Gorelick's words), many top-flight financial services companies held its stock.

Last week it was revealed that top insurer AIG was teetering on the precipice of disaster because, in part, it held $600 million in Fannie and Freddie. Roughly $4 billion in those stocks are held by insurers, according to rating agency A.M. Best.

Put simply, FNMA's collapse helped touch off the current swath of instability in the financial system.

It's not often that one person plays such a key role in two unmitigated disasters.

Correct me please if I'm wrong, but isn't Jamie Gorelick a Democrat?

But, just to forestall the inevitable "cherry-picking" charge, let's cut right to the genesis of this "trillion dollar disaster".  It's a place that ought never to be far from conservative memories:

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America. [emphases mine]

See Jamie "Mistress of Disasters" Gorelick above.

You just knew if you traced this mess back far enough, you'd find Bill F'ing Clinton's fingerprints on it.  It's classic liberalism: meddle in and strong-arm a market to act against the interests of its stockholders and its customers, knock it over into chaos and bankruptcy, then swoop in, demonize the victims, blame everything on capitalism, conservatism, and the GOP, and demand effective nationalization under Democrat rule.  Heads they win, tails we lose.

So, then, since it is the failed, greedy, predatory socialist policies of Barack Obama's Democrat party that brought about the "Wall Street Meltdown," and BO is touting those same failed policies as the "solution" and smearing culpability on President Bush, what is the truth of Dubya's role?

Would you believe he tried to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with "new rules" five years ago?  And would you believe it was Democrats who led the charge against it?:

The Bush Administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the Administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates....

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

You see where the Dems' focus was back then: on the policy result they ordered the mortgage industry to produce.  They didn't want to hear hide or hare of the long-term damage it was doing to the financial sector, so they made believe it wasn't happening and villified anybody - like the Bush White House - that argued otherwise and tried to do something, anything, about it.

If this is sounding uncomfortably like a dress rehearsal of the looming collapses of Social Security and Medicare, congratulations on your rudimentary perspicacity.  You can bet that when the day of that "meltdown" dawns, Democrats will be blaming that on the market, on capitalism, on conservatives, and on the GOP as well.  And Bush, too, just for gratuitous salt in the wound.

So the Democrats created the "Wall Street Meltdown" AND helped prevent the Bush Administration from averting it.  McCain should be flogging the living crap out of the former, but, wanting to avoid any linkage with the public-relations-obtuse GDub like leprosy itself, he could always mention that he tried to get similar legislation passed just two years later:

Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.

The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

This Senate bill met the same fate as its House counterpart two years before, and for the same basic reason: Democrat greed, in the persons of Connecticut's Chris Dodd, and Illinois'....Barack Hussein Obama:

Let's reiterate the, er, money passages:

***The top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were democrats and number two is Senator Barack Obama.

***Now, remember, he has only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab the number two spot ahead of John Kerry, decades in the senate, and Chris Dodd who is chairman of the senate banking committee.

***The Clinton administration’s White House budget director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected fifty million dollars. Jamie G[orelick], Clinton Justice Apartment Official, worked for Fannie and took home twenty-six million dollars. Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae C.E.O. job.

Raines and Johnson, BTW, are both economic advisors to The One.

So, let's add this up: The collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearnes, and now Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and AIG (which got nationalized today after all) was mandated by left-wing regulatory meddling that coerced them into creating an entire sub-sector - the "subprime mortgage market" - that was based on lending vast sums to the poor at bargain basement interest rates to make them home-owners, most, if not all, of whom had no business borrowing that kind of money and had no reasonable hope of repaying it.  Just as with the S&L sector twenty years ago, the implicit presence of taxpayer backing created and relentlessly inflated the "housing/real estate bubble".  The go-go-go-ism of all that easy money was an irresistable lure for every grifter, fixer, and crook - sorry, no need for redundancy - every Democrat who wanted to jump in, score a seven- or eight- or nine-figure payday, and get out before it all came tumbling down.  Elected Donks also got in on the gravy train, most especially including their 2008 presidential nominee, who employs two greedy ex-Fannie Mae CEOs and has taken a ton of lobbyist contributions from the mortgage industry.  Meanwhile, George W. Bush and John Sith McCain tried to act to prevent this "financial meltdown," and were thwarted....by the Democrats who thought the easy money would go on forever.

And who's getting the blame for it?  George W. Bush and John Sith McCain, as judged by....Barack Hussein Obama.

There's one more money quote from the afore-embedded Fox News clip:

Wow, that’s quite a report, begs the question — where is John McCain on this?

"He's talking, but he's not really saying anything!"

UPDATE: The reason why it is imperative for Sailor to get specific about what, and whose, policies caused this mess and who tried to avert it is precisely that Rogaine Messiah has the much easier task.  As the challengers, they have no record to defend, no "watch" on which anything bad has happened yet.  All they have to do is point the finger at Bush and another at McCain and say he's four more years of him.  It's rankly unfair, utter and complete BS, and the most empty-headed of demogoguery, but it's been known to work, especially if Republicans are (as is usually the case) indolent about framing the issue first.  That's why I groaned so loudly when Darth Queeg's first ad came out Monday.  Like it or not, things like this are blamefests, all the more so in the midst of a presidential campaign.  If you don't seize that initiative first and throw your foes on the defensive, you're toast.  McCain didn't, and I could just see all the progress Team Sith has made over the past two months evaporating in a fusillade of Donk lies and Marxian fearmongering.

It still may do so - or perhaps it won't.  If the latter, it will most likely be because of another gag-worthy piece of foolishness from Weasel of the Tribe of Jeremiah:

Barack Obama partied with Hollywood celebrities Tuesday night and with the help of Oscar-winning singer and actress Barbra Streisand raised an eye-popping $9 million for his presidential campaign and the Democratic Party.

The night was split into two glitzy events, a reception and dinner costing $28,500 each at the Greystone Mansion, followed by entertainment by Streisand at the nearby Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. About 250-300 people were expected at the dinner and about 800 at the entertainment, which cost $2,500 a ticket.

Dinner guests seen by reporters, or noted by waiters, included Will Ferrell, Jodie Foster, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Lee Curtis and DreamWorks founders Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenbach.

Could his timing be any more abysmal?  At a time when millions in Texas and clear up the Mississippi River valley are without power and coping with billions in property damage after Hurricane Ike, the very day after the "Wall Street Meltdown" hits, the man who "portrayed Republican challenger John McCain as out of touch with the needs of hardworking people" jets off to La-La Land to play celebrity with his rich, brainless, pagan friends.  If I'm advising him, I sit him down and tell him the facts of life: "Senator, I don't give a [bleep] how badly you need the nine mil, and I don't give a rat's ass how long this shindig has been scheduled - RE-SCHEDULE IT!  You've had an economic disaster on Bush's watch DROPPED RIGHT IN YOUR FREAKING LAP!  If you dash off to Tinseltown and away from the lumpenproletariat now, you'll piss away the last, best chance to turn this campaign around that you'll ever get!  You'll sink McCain's definition of you as an arrogant elitist in cement in the minds of Main Street America!"

I don't know if any advisor gave him that barked advice.  Probably not, since they're all zombies anyway, and any who did would be either fired on the spot or cleaved in two by a lightning bolt, or both.  A pity for his sake, because after more or less botching the PR angle on the "Wall Street Meltdown" thus far, the Sith Master didn't waste the golden opportunity his risible opponent handed to him:

One thing is for certain: if The Golden Child does win in November, it'll be despite himself.  If he were deliberately trying to tank this election, he couldn't be doing a much more effective job of it.  Hopefully this new level of piss & vinegar shows Maverick realizes that he's got to do more than politely stand back and hope Barry self-destructs, but, in the immortal (paraphrased) words of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, "If you see your opponent drowning in a lake, grab a hose, row out to him, stick it down his throat, and turn it on high."

Or, to quote the Pragmatist's Golden Rule, "Do unto others before they can do unto you."