Serpents Among The Ruins

Multiple I-told-you-so's vindicating my "you can never be too cynical about the 'Destructocrats'" instincts:

***My, how the "compassion" of liberals is leavened by the crassness of their partisan mendacities:

Representative Hank Johnson, D-GA, told me yesterday that he felt no pressure at all to vote for the bill.

"For me it was an easy decision," Johnson said. "The bill has nothing in there that mandates workouts of these foreclosures that are pending. We have up to 5 million that are meant to occur over the next year."

"It was a Republican-caused bill and the Republicans, it looks like they failed to muster enough support to get this thing passed," Johnson told me.

What about the Dow going down 778 points?

"The stock market goes up, the stock market goes down, that's not something that I am particularly concerned with," he said. "I believe that the market will get over this initial shock that the corporate bailout plan did not go through, and that it will recover."

1) IT IS NOT A "REPUBLICAN-CAUSED" BILL!!!!! You may notice a slight level of frustration on my part at this F'ING LIE becoming the conventional wisdom, and Republicans not doing a blessed thing to correct it.

2) No, Congressman, it was YOUR party that "failed to muster enough support to get this thing passed." YOUR party is in the majority, which makes it YOUR party's responsibility, if you TRULY have the best interests of the country at heart - and if you are capable of separating them from those of....your party.

3) I'm guessing Johnson is from a gerrymandered district. Still, I cannot help but wonder what his constituents think of the cavalier fashion in which he dismisses his Speaker's wanton erasure of seven percent of their retirement stash.

***Some additional insight into why it wasn't Crazy Nancy pissing in their faces that whittled GOP support for the bailout compromise to one out of three:

While the vote was being made, I was listening to Chris Van Hollen, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, speaking on National Public Radio, who was basically saying that we're going to use this issue against the Republicans in the fall. Now, then I went and took a look at the vote, and then talked to some members. Now, when you've got a big issue like this, and we've been through a number of them, the pit of the house in a big important vital vote like this is an emotional place, as people contemplate, literally, whether or not they are going to end their political futures by their vote.

And so you've got Republicans there who are being asked to vote for this, and they're hearing Chris Van Hollen, literally, there are sixteen vulnerable House Democrat freshman who are allowed to vote no. And they're being told on the floor by Van Hollen and others, 'you can vote against this.' There are five committee chairs who owe their positions to Nancy Pelosi — John Conyers, chairman of judiciary. Colin Peterson, chairman of agriculture, Filner, head of veterans, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, head of homeland security, Gene Green gead of the Ethics Commission - and those five committee chairs are voting no.

You have senior Democrats like Solomon Ortiz, Pete Stark, the number two guy on the Ways and Means Committee, Fazio of Oregon, Clay of Missouri, Costello of Illinois - Jesse - you know, all of whom are close to the speaker, and they're voting no. You have some of her close friends and allies like the Sanchez sisters of California and Lynn Woolsey and Herseth Sandlin from South Dakota and Barbara Lee close friends and allies voting no.

Republicans are sitting on the floor seeing her take a two-by-four to them and then let these people who are her allies and supporters and friends and committee chairs and members of her leadership vote no. I mean, what was the Speaker thinking?

She was thinking of leading a three-hundred-seat House majority in the 111th Congress, Architect. Either by double-crossing Republicans into defying public opposition ot the bailout while giving her own vulnerable Members a pass, or by torpedoing the bill through her infuriating bellicosity and "benign neglect" at failing to whip her caucus behind it (or malign neglect by whipping her caucus against it) and then blaming an economic collapse on those same Republicans. Another "heads she wins/tails we lose" proposition. And now, perhaps both at the same time! Almost as if Nora Desmond wants to pretend her party is still in the minority or something.

I wonder if the Dow recovering nearly five hundred of the points it shed yesterday will calm public jitters enough to hold public bailout opposition steady. In which case the Speakerette would (presumeably) be deterred from ramming through the Donk version of the bailout on a party-line vote, but could in turn produce a legislative Mexican standoff - at least until the next Dow plunge. This leads straight into the next question: At what point would the "It's all the Republicans' fault!" BS finally start to wear thin with the public watching their savings go up in smoke and a Congress run by the Democrats fiddling and diddling in the midst of it? Isn't this hand overplayable at some point? Or has the "Bankrupt the people/screw the Republicans" baton already been handed off to Harry "We've got to end the partisan bickering" Reid, with the hard-left goodies stripped out of the original compromise to be put back in in conference? And will he be able to get cloture when only a third of the Senate is up for re-election this year, most of them Republicans who are headed for electoral butchering regardless of the outcome? Yeah, Mitch McConnell was also peddling the "bipartisan" Kool-Aid, but didn't John Boehner pretty much do the same thing?

***See, I told you so again, and not just from Michael Moore:

The bail out will take place simply to avoid that depression. But depressions have some salutary effects - the scoundrels go belly up, the weakest get purged. And, in the wake of the disaster, people demand strict regulation of the money lenders to keep their greed in check, and government spends money on the real economy to put people back to work.”

"Money-lenders" = entrepreneuers/pro-growthers/wealth-creaters/supply-siders/free market capitalists; "Government spends money on the real economy" = complete decimation and absorption of the private sector. Shit, at least Lenin had to sneak into Russia on a camouflaged train. Pinkos like Bob Borosage get to run around in plain, unfettered sight. One would like to ask him where the government is supposed to get this money it is supposed to spend in the "real economy" once he and his subversives have killed the golden goose. And he calls the "money-lenders" - which in this case were all DEMOCRATS, don't forget - "greedy"?

Get a load of one of the commenters to Borosage's post:

Let the whole damned system burn to the ground. Whatever their ideological leanings, left or right or in between, the elites of our society have proven themselves corrupt, craven, foolish, brutal, heartless, anti-democratic, and anti-human. Yes, let the whole damned society burn to the ground, sweep away the pathetic ashes of the malevolent, disgusting, warped edifice the elites have erected to imprison the people, and build a new, better America atop the grave."

Afraid yet of this "who's who of American liberalism," my friends? Can't this....candor be interpreted just as easily as an engraved invitation to let al Qaeda set off a series of suitcase nukes in American cities? Or Iran to EMP us back to the nineteenth century? Wouldn't "letting the whole damned society burn to the ground" be a convenient opportunity to get rid of people they disagree with, the easier to "build a new, better [communist] America" atop our [mass] graves"? To say this rhetoric sounds Naziesque is to be exceedingly charitable. And you think I'm exaggerating when I refer to these animals as "neoBolsheviks"?

J-Ger is very concerned. He even echoes my line from last week, and beats me to the apropo pop-culture quotation: