Of Donald Trump’s Rabidly Stupid Remarks And His Pig-headed Determination To Stand By Them

Let me just begin by prefacing thus: there are a LOT of reasons to attack John McCain.  For simple starters he’s a RHINO – which for politically illiterate is an acronym meaning “Republican In Name Only” – who has made a career out of splitting the difference by betraying conservatives.  I voted for him in the general election, because my alternative was a backstabber or the damned devil, but no way was that turd my primary vote.

So there are a LOT of ways that a reasonable person could reasonably attack John McCain.  Heck, one of those ways involves the very category of “prisoner of war” that Donald Trump attacked McCain on.  Certainly Trump had every right to go after John McCain for saying that 15,000 American citizens living in McCain’s own state of Arizona were “crazies.”

But for the official record the way that Donald Trump viciously attacked John McCain simply for BEING a prisoner of war is beneath the pale of decency or dignity.  And Donald Trump seriously needs to be fired by every decent American for his stupid idiotic indecency.

Donald Trump said the following about John McCain:

Luntz: “He’s a war hero. He’s a war hero …”

Trump: “He’s not a war hero …”

Luntz: “He’s war hero.”

Trump: “He is a war hero …”

Luntz: “Five and half years in a Vietnamese prison camp …”

Trump: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured. So he’s a war hero …”

Luntz: “Do you agree with that?”

Trump: “He’s a war hero, because he was captured, okay? I believe, perhaps, he’s a war hero. But right now he said some very bad things about a lot of people. So what I said is John McCain, I disagree with him that these people aren’t crazy.”

Okay, Trump had his say.  But here is something called the ACTUAL DAMN FACTS as to how John McCain became a P.O.W.:

On October 26, 1967, McCain was flying his twenty-third mission, part of a twenty-plane strike force against the Yen Phu thermal power plant in central Hanoi^[102][103] that previously had almost always been off-limits to U.S. raids due to the possibility of collateral damage.^[101] Arriving just before noon, McCain dove from 9,000 to 4,000 feet on his approach;^[104] as he neared the target, warning systems in McCain’s A-4E Skyhawk alerted him that he was being tracked by enemy fire-control radar.^[105] Like other U.S. pilots in similar situations, he did not break off the bombing run,^[62] and he held his dive until he released his bombs at about 3,500 feet (1,000 m).^[106] As he started to pull up, the Skyhawk’s wing was blown off by a Soviet-made SA-2 anti-aircraft missile fired by the North Vietnamese Air Defense Command’s 61st Battalion,^[101][104] commanded by Captain Nguyen Lan^[104] and with fire control officer Lieutenant Nguyen Xuan Dai.^[101][104] (McCain was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for this day,^[100] while Nguyen Xuan Dai was awarded the title Hero of the People’s Armed Forces.^[101] Decades later, Soviet Army Lieutenant Yuri Trushechkin claimed that he had been the missile guidance officer who had shot McCain down.^[107][108] In any case, the raid was a failure, as the power plant was not damaged and three of the Navy planes were shot down.^[104])

McCain being pulled out of Trúc Bạch Lake in Hanoi and about to become a prisoner of war,^[109] on October 26, 1967.

McCain’s plane went into a vertical inverted spin.^[110] Bailing out upside down at high speed,^[111] the force of the ejection fractured McCain’s right arm in three places, his left arm, and his right leg at the knee, and knocked him unconscious.^[111][112] McCain nearly drowned after parachuting into Trúc Bạch Lake in Hanoi; the weight of his equipment was pulling him down, and as he regained consciousness, he could not use his arms.^[105] Eventually, he was able to inflate his life vest using his teeth.^[105] Several Vietnamese, possibly led by Department of Industry clerk Mai Van On, pulled him ashore.^[113] A mob gathered around, spat on him, kicked him, and stripped him of his clothes; his left shoulder was crushed with the butt of a rifle and he was bayoneted in his left foot and abdominal area.^{[105][111][112]} He was then transported to Hanoi’s main Hỏa Lò Prison, nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by American POWs.^[114]

McCain reached Hoa Lo in as bad a physical condition as any prisoner during the war.^[114] His captors refused to give him medical care unless he gave them military information; they beat and interrogated him, but McCain only offered his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth^[115][116] (the only information he was required to provide under the Geneva Conventions and permitted to give under the U.S. Code of Conduct).^[104] Soon thinking he was near death, McCain said he would give them more information if taken to the hospital,^[115] hoping he could then put his interrogators off once he was treated.^[117] A prison doctor came and said it was too late, as McCain was about to die anyway.^[115] Only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a top admiral did they give him medical care,^[115] calling him “the crown prince”.^[114] Two days after McCain’s plane went down, that event and his status as a POW made the front pages of The New York Times^[92] and The Washington Post.^[118] Interrogation and beatings resumed in the hospital; McCain gave the North Vietnamese his ship’s name, squadron’s name, and the attack’s intended target.^[119] This information, along with personal details of McCain’s life and purported statements by McCain about the war’s progress, would appear over the next two weeks in the North Vietnamese official newspaper Nhân Dân^[104] as well as in dispatches from outlets such as the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina.^[120] Disclosing the military information was in violation of the Code of Conduct, which McCain later wrote he regretted, although he saw the information as being of no practical use to the North Vietnamese.^[121] Further coerced to give future targets, he named cities that had already been bombed, and responding to demands for the names of his squadron’s members, he supplied instead the names of the Green Bay Packers‘ offensive line.^[119][122]

It’s not like John McCain did a Bowe Bergdahl and abandoned his fellow soldiers to seek out and subsequently provide aid and comfort to the enemy.  John McCain is a combat veteran who had honorably served his country in time of war in 22 previous missions before being shot out of the sky, terribly wounded, and pulled out of a lake where he nearly drowned.  He was easily taken prisoner because his arms were too injured to move and one of his legs was useless.  The obvious implication is “JUST WHAT THE HELL WAS THE GUY SUPPOSED TO DO?”

Let me ask some follow-up questions of Donald Trump:

1) Are you seriously telling me that you possessed – in spite of your own lies about dodging the draft and your five damned deferments – that you possessed far superior fighter jet aviator training such that there is no way you could have ever possibly been shot down out of the sky by an anti-aircraft missile?  Is that your story, The Donald?  That had it been YOU in that cockpit the man who repeatedly obtained deferral after deferall rather than serve in the war that you insinuated John McCain was some kind of coward for having actually FOUGHT in you would have used your superior hair weave to duck and dodge the missiles that took McCain’s aircraft out???  Because you are Trump the CHUMP if that’s your testimony, you worthless boastful punk.

2) Is it your suggestion that John McCain would have been braver had he done what YOU would have done – because YOU’RE the one who dodged fighting in a war with your superior skills in compiling an impressive number of student deferments – and by simply refusing to serve in the first place???  Is THAT what you’re saying?  That cowardice is the better part compared to valor???  Are you saying that at the first sign that you were being tracked by enemy radar, that you would have bailed on your mission as John McCain failed to do because unlike you he actually IS a war hero???

3) Or maybe you’re suggesting to us that had it been YOU that had been shot down by a missile, had it been YOU who were shot down “in as bad physical condition as any prisoner during the war” – that you would have tied your ridiculously expensive business-suit’s accompanying necktie around your head like the businessman-version of Rambo and killed 10,000 North Vietnamese with your bare hands as you crawled your way to the border on your ruined knee???  Maybe THAT is what you’re saying, you pathetic little turd???

But actually I think what Donald Trump is really telling us is that 4) Trump the Chump looks at Adolf Hitler and says, “Now there is one awesome badass great LEADER!”  Allow me to provide illustrations of what I mean before I explain myself further:

Regarding Adolf Hitler: the Führer had a nasty habit of giving orders to his soldiers such that “Every man shall fight or fall where he stands.”  He REPEATDLY ordered his units to die fighting rather than surrender or even merely withdrawal rather than be overrun.  As one US military analysis of Hitler’s “leadership” we have the following typical statement (see page 22):

Hitler’s unrelenting policy of no retreat at Stalingrad cost thousands of German soldiers’ lives. According to James Duffy, “It was a policy of fanatical resistance. On October 14, 1942, Hitler issued this order to his troops: ‘Every leader, down to squad leader must be convinced of his sacred duty to stand fast come what may even if the enemy outflanks him on the right and left, even if his part of the line is cut off, encircled, overrun by tanks, enveloped in smoke or gassed.’”

One of Hitler’s own generals said of his “leadership”:

And there were, for Hitler the commander, some deeper flaws as German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein observed: “He was a man who saw fighting only in terms of the utmost brutality. His way of thinking conformed more to a mental picture of masses of the enemy bleeding to death before our lines than to the conception of a subtle fencer who knows how to make an occasional step backwards in order to lunge for the decisive thrust. For the art of war he substituted a brutal force which, as he saw it, was guaranteed maximum effectiveness by the will-power behind it…. Despite the pains Hitler took to stress his own former status as a frontline soldier, I still never had the feeling that his heart belonged to the fighting troops. Losses, as far as he was concerned, were merely figures which reduced fighting power. They are unlikely to have seriously disturbed him as a human being.”

Another German general, Alfred Jodl, described “Hitler’s almost mystical conviction of his own infallibility as leader of the nation and of the war.”  Which I personally see fitting Donald Trump to a “T” when you listen to Trump’s idiotic and fanciful statements that he’d build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it or from a position of weakness and debtor (WE owe THEM trillions of dollars) somehow end up owning them because of course he’s just that darn great.

And just before he shot himself to death like a coward rather than actually die fighting the way he had ordered millions of his own men to do, Hitler decreed:

‘The armed forces have lied to me and now the SS has left me in the lurch. The German people has not fought heroically. It deserves to perish.

‘It is not I who have lost the war, but the German people’.”

So under a Hitler – and yeah, under a Trump the Chump – you pretty much have two choices as a soldier: die fighting or just die.  Otherwise you’re a coward.

Now, Hitler said he couldn’t fight because he might get merely wounded instead of killed and then be captured:

“He said that he could not go out and die fighting on the barricades as he was afraid of merely being wounded and captured by the Russians. He would therefore shoot himself.”

And we couldn’t have that, could we?  So he ordered his men to die rather than give one inch of ground while he himself cowered in the concrete bunker that the millions serving him were ordered to die to protect.  And then there’s Trump the Chump, who in spite of his four student deferments before finally managing to find some doctor who was willing to say that Trump was too much of a pathetic little physical wuss to serve, that somehow John McCain should have died fighting in spite of having just sustained terrible wounds after being shot out of the sky by a missile.

I think it’s 4), myself.  Not that the other three make Trump look like anything other than an outright idiot, but personally I find 4) the most terrifying indictment of Trump the Chump of all of the above.

Under a Trump the Chump Führer-in-chieftainship, if President Trump the Chump orders a fascist-style banzai charge, you run into machine gun fire screaming and you die.  But what you are NOT allowed to do under ANY circumstances possible is to allow yourself to be captured for any reason under the Rising Sun.

In the aforementioned Imperial fascist Rising Sun mentality, we have soldiers that a President Trump the Chump could approve of:

LAURENCE REES: And how can we understand the reasons for what you call the ‘suicidal mentality’ of the Japanese?

AKIRA IRIYE: Some people trace it back all the way to the feudal ethos. I think it seems to be a combination of two things. One is belief in Japanese national uniqueness, again this is an insular mentality, summed up in the sense that Japan is a unique country unlike any other country that can do things that no other country can do, and things like that. And this sense of uniqueness is combined with the Emperor worship. Again this is rather a recent origin: in the 1870s and 1880s the government decided to rally national opinion around the image of the Sacred Emperor, because this Emperor system seemed to be a long living line of Emperors; that is the longevity of the imperial line. Japan was unique and you died for your country but in fact you died for your Emperor, everything was in the name of the Emperor.  In war, in battle, [soldiers] fought for the sake of honouring the Emperor, that kind of thing. That is one, mental attitude.

And the second reason is a more material kind of reason. That is that the Japanese army is much more poorly equipped. So the Japanese say, well, maybe we’re not as good in producing so many weapons as the Americans, but we have this spiritual aspect to it, that we can fight not simply with guns, but we can fight with our spirit. That spirit is the spirit of our selflessness and this is nothing that is part of your fighting. You know this famous exhortation not to be taken prisoner of war because they say to be taken prisoner of war is a shameful thing. Why? Because it shows that you have not fought till the very end. To fight to the very end is to honour the Emperor and to show that you can compensate for meagre weapons by using yourself, perhaps as a human shield, or in a suicide attack.

For these reasons I think even as early as the Russian/Japanese War you get lots of Japanese casualties because they believe in it, that death in battle is an honourable thing. I would think that there were so few Japanese prisoners of war taken by the Russians because they either committed suicide or they just fought to the very end before the Russians could capture them. The same is true in the 1930’s as well. I think you brought dishonour to your family and to your parents if you were caught prisoner during the war, so for these reasons I think there is a sense that the war is never finished until the last man dies. And the last man dies because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

LAURENCE REES: How can we understand here in the West this phenomenal cultural pressure on the individual to conform?

AKIRA IRIYE: I think there is no question about that. I think a kind of collective mentality, or collectivist mentality, and also the idea that you are a member of this family, and what you do brings dishonour to your parents, but not only that, to the Emperor too. This is the whole idea of the nation as one family with the Emperor as the Divine Head. So whatever you do you are bringing either honour or dishonour to the Emperor. There’s nothing in between. So to die is more honourable than to live. I think the conception of life and death, things like that, are maybe at the basis of this. No individual thinking here. Of course there were people who were not that way, but they would not be able to express their opinion more clearly or more frankly during the war because of the mentality of wartime Japan.

Under the Western and American concept of warfare, you are ordered to place yourself at risk.  You are ordered into harm’s way.  You are ordered to fight the enemy.  But in the face of certain death, you are NOT required to die.  Americans are individuals, not herd animals.  You fight honorably, but you have the right to surrender when you have no other option but certain death.

But Trump the Chump’s remark which was tantamount to an assertion that every single prisoner of war was somehow a failure has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western or American concept of a soldier honorably serving on a field of battle; it is straight out of Hitler and it is straight out of Imperial Japanese fascist emperor-worship.

So under Emperor Trump, you die fighting for the glory and honor of “The Donald.”  A Trump the Chump cannot understand why you would not be willing to take a few hundred bullets for him.

To allow a Donald Trump to be anywhere NEAR the office of the president of the United States is simply evil.  We fought a terrible war to kick people like Donald Trump out of their dictatorships.

And the man is so pig-headed that he cannot admit that he made a mistake any more than the CURRENT DISGRACE-IN-CHIEF contaminating our White House.

Allow me to now point out that this isn’t the first incredibly wrong thing that Donald Trump has said.  What Donald Trump said about illegal immigrants was beneath the pale of dignity, as well.

Understand, I am fiercely opposed to illegal immigration.  I believe that we should be fighting with everything we’ve got to dismantle a system whereby people are encouraged to essentially put themselves at the head of the line ahead of all the people trying to enter America from all around the world LEGALLY by ignoring our laws and just flooding into this country.  BUT my beef is NOT with the people coming into America, but with ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.  Whereas Trump the Chump personally demonized the character of pretty much nearly ALL illegal immigrants.

Allow me to contrast my own belief about illegal immigrants vis-à-vis the system tolerating and even encouraging illegal immigration from a prior article to Donald Trump’s vindictive statements:

Let me assure you of something: if Hispanic illegal immigrants voted Republican, you would see the rabid, poison-dripping FANGS of Democrats come out in a spirit of rage and hate unlike nothing you’ve ever seen on the faces of Republicans as they went completely poop-flinging nuts over the invasion of our border.

I attend a church that has an English and Hispanic congregation.  And I regularly take part in ministry to Hispanics, quite a few of which are here illegally.  As a true Christian, I DON’T hate illegal immigrants.  I realize as a moral human being that if I were a poor Mexican or Central American living in a completely failed state the way these people are, I would come to America too – either legally or illegally.  I recognize that for many illegal immigrants, work is a good thing that they are grateful for.  And that they send a lot of the money they earn home to their families.  These are virtuous things.  What I rabidly despise is a cynical and dishonest liberal ideology that wants to politically benefit from these poor people’s misery and ignorance.  I blame the left for its hostility to America as they seek to cynically grab further political advantages by exploiting these people.  Liberals are like drunken braggarts in a bar, buying drinks for everyone in order to be popular and then refusing to pay the tab when the bill comes.  America cannot afford to continue living so wildly and wickedly beyond our means.  We are going to completely economically and socially collapse because of the vile wickedness of Democrats.  And then you will see suffering as you have never seen before – suffering that Democrats forced upon the America that they destroyed.

I believe, therefore, that we ought to treat the illegal immigrants who are coming here as human beings.  And that we should protect our nation, protect our borders, protect our culture, protect our way of life by controlling our borders and enforcing our laws.

You see the difference?  I recognize that many, MANY illegal immigrants are good and decent people whose ultimate crime is to give themselves and their families a better life than they could ever get in the pathologically broken system that is Mexico and much of Central America.  Are there terrible criminal illegal immigrants?  Okay, yes.  But on the same token, are there terrible criminal LEGAL immigrants?  Yep.  And for that matter, are there terrible criminal native-born American CITIZENS?  Oh, you betcha, there are.

My theory on illegal immigration is that we need to profoundly reform our SYSTEM.  We need to begin by first changing the law that BROKE our system: the 1965 law that “reformed” our system that had previously favored immigrants with vital job skills that this nation desperately needed in order to maintain the best industrial base in the world to one whose central purpose was reuniting families.  Should we have a system that emphasizes more doctors, more engineers, more mechanics, more skilled workers, more trained people who can help build America, or should we bring in every single family member of the immigrants who are already here?  Democrats broke our system by preferring the latter over the former.  And that inaugurated a flood of immigration that has NOT made America better, but worse, not richer, but poorer.  We certainly also need to aggressively patrol our borders and deport the people who should not be here.

But we shouldn’t demonize the millions of people who came here seeking a better life.  And I believe that if I were a Mexican and my country was broken the way Mexico was broken and America gave me a chance for building a better life for my family, I would come here to.  And no I would NOT be a “rapist” for doing so, contrary to Trump the Chump.

As a conservative and as a Republican, I demand that we continue to make a distinction between being “anti-illegal immigration” versus being “anti-immigrant.”  And I believe Donald Trump stupidly crossed a line and should have apologized immediately rather than “doubling down” as is apparently the only trick of this one-trick pony.

If you exclude Donald Trump’s giving since 2012 – when he decided he was a “Republican,” Donald Trump has actually given more money to the DEMOCRAT Party over the previous 26 years.  Prior to 2012, Trump gave $581,350 to DEMOCRATS versus only $497,690 to the GOP.  But even when you factor in Trump’s total giving, the man hardly stands as a genuine Republican.  Politifact acknowledges that “Trump has actually been relatively evenhanded in doling out cash to the two parties” and that “The difference in donations is almost entirely captured in Trump’s recent giving” when Trump went from 1989 to 2012 giving MORE to Democrats to giving $463,450 to Republicans against $3,500 to Democrats.  Personally, I would just assume that my Republican president hadn’t only been one for three years and had been a Democrat prior to that.

The man clearly is NO spokesman for the Republican Party or Republican Party values.  And as just one shining example of the hypocritical and opportunistic demagogue that Trump the Chump truly is, he actually attacked Mitt Romney’s very moderate position on illegal immigration as “mean-spirited” in 2012.  Which may mean that while he isn’t the racist he’s coming off as being, what he in fact is is a dishonest demagogue who will say whatever the hell will get him the attention that this arrogant blowhard narcissist clearly seems to need.

Donald Trump needs to be made to shut up and go away.  And yes, anybody who actually thinks that this fool ought to be president IS certainly a “crazy” from this point on, if he or she wasn’t one already.

Christine O’Donnell Fires Back At McCain: Don’t Call Me A Tea Party Loser You RINO LOSER

John McCain took it upon himself to do everything he could to help Democrts ridicule and marginalize the Tea Party and Tea Party candidates yesterday.

I supported John McCain’s presidential bid because as bad as we was, he was still better than the now-documented failure of Barack Obama.  But I held my nose to support him – at least until he nominated Sarah Palin.

John McCain ran a dismal and pathetic campaign.  On my view, he was far more concerned with maintaining his “Senatorial dignity” than he was with saving America from a dangerous Marxist fraud.  As just one example, consider his elitest refusal to go after Barack Obama for his twenty-plus years spent in a racist, Marxist and anti-American “church” under the “spiritual mentoring” of a wicked Jeremiah Wright.  Even Obama said that attack would be legitimate, but John McCain was far too hoity toity to pursue it.

So when McCain went after Christine O’Donnell as an example of the failure of the Tea Party, O’Donnell responded thusly:

“I think that it is inappropriate to insult the judgment of the majority of Republicans in Nevada and Delaware and that the implication that nominating RINOs somehow means we win was irrefutably disproven by McCain’s own presidential candidacy debacle. After that nightmare, McCain had to veer right so fast he almost got whiplash from all his flip-flopping just to keep his Senate seat. It doesn’t help him to attack those conservatives and Tea Partiers who graciously gave him another chance to keep his job.”

And let me say, “You GO, girl.”

I agree that Christine O’Donnell WAS a weak candidate, but that weakness had everything to do with her lack of political experience and a few documented personal issues, and NOTHING to do with her Tea Party policy views.  When she did her famous/infamous “I am not a witch” ad, what the hell did that have to do with her Tea Party beliefs???’

Democrats always tell us that RINOS are “their greatest threat.”  They did it with McCain, and they are doing it now with RINO Jon Huntsman.  And RINOS are fool enough to believe Lucy and keep trying to kick the football.

What they don’t understand is that Democrats know how to morph RINOS into bloody right-wing bogeymen who will take away all the socialist benefits the sugar-daddy Democrats fought for:

Conservatives know the RINO is a RINO and have no enthusiasm for the useless RINO whatsoever, and the RINO doesn’t have enough of a principled stand on anything to garner powerful support from anywhere else.

And thus down goes the RINO.

I supported John McCain for president and gave money to his campaign.  He STILL keeps hectoring me for money.  I supported Scott Brown and sent money to his campaign, too.  And HE still keeps hectoring me for money.

One went down in flames, the other pulled off a win.  But neither one of them ended up doing a dang thing that made my donation worthwhile; and I won’t be making those mistakes again.

Prior to his run for the presidency, I largely regarded John McCain as an embarassment whose sole quality had been his suffering as a POW during the Vietnam War.  And now, since his failed run for the presidency, I AGAIN largely regard John McCain as an embarassment whose sole quality was his suffering as a POW during the Vietnam War.

The bottom line on RINOS is that you simply cannot trust them to take a strong and courageous stand when the heat is on.

John McCain walked onto the Senate floor and violated Reagan’s 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”

And why this man was so willing to attack Christine O’Donnell when he couldn’t bring himself to attack Barack Obama when it counted is utterly beyond me.

 

Obama’s ‘Hope And Change’ At Work: Most Americans (Correctly) Believe Our Best Days Are Now Behind Us

History reminds us of a time – not all that long ago – when a charismatic leader promised a fundamental transformation that brought hope to a nation.

The leaders’s name was Adolf Hitler.  It didn’t end well.  Seriously.

The kind of fascistic irrationally euphoric Utopian rhetoric of Obama –

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

– hasn’t seemed to work out very well in the real world.  I mean who talks like that but a fascist demagogue promising a false Utopia, anyway?  Not that most liberals have any clue whatsoever about the real world, mind you.

The evidence is crystal clear that Obama is a fascist and a demagogue.  But the mainstream media is every bit as unlikely to tell the truth about Obama as Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda was likely to tell the truth about their Fuhrer.

The New York Times once said – as part of the irrational fascistic hype surrounding Obama – that:

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

Did Obama ever once come close to actually fulfilling that “core presidential promise”???

How about this: within 24 days of Obama assuming the presidency, The Wall Street Journal was rightly able to say this about our “transcending” figure:

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package

It wasn’t even a month after assuming the presidency that Obama began to dismiss the Republicans he had promised to reach out to:

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” he admonished in a speech.

It was barely only a month after assuming the presidency that Obama began to thumb his nose at the Republicans he had promised to reach out to:

 When [Republican Rep. Eric] Cantor tried to justify his own position, Obama responded: “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”

Were those really the words that would “transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years”???  In taking that stand, was there actually any chance whatsoever that Obama would “end the partisan and ideological wars”???  Is anyone frankly so morally and intellectually stupid to see these tactics as they way to “build a new governing majority”???

And of course, shortly after the American people rejected Obama in the largest shallacking in modern American history and voted against the Democrat Party in droves, Nancy Pelosi began to further degenerate into fascism (where elections shouldn’t matter unless the fascists win them), saying: “elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”

And then we proceeded to see Democrats and liberals behave far more like fascists than people who gave a damn about elections or the consequences of elections in Wisconsin.

I think of the fact that Hitler never won more than 37% of the vote.  But the moment he seized power, “elections didn’t matter as much as they should have.”

Barack Obama is a man who has personally repeatedly demonized George W. Bush, Republicans, entire industries, businesses, and even medical doctors (remember how they amputate people’s feet and yank out their tonsils just to illegitimately profit?).  As a Senator, he personally attacked George Bush for his failure of leadership for having to raise the debt ceiling; now he’s personally attacking anyone who acts as cynically and despicably as he acted.  Obama personally demonized George Bush for trampling on the Constitution for Iraq even though Congress had directly authorized his actions; but this same cynical demagogue would attack Libya without any congressional authorization whatsoever.  Obama lectured Republicans that it hurt the country and the essential political debate to demagogue the other side with health care, only to viciously attack the Republicans the first time he thought it would politically help him to do so.  Rep Ryan – whom he invited to his speech just to single him out for attack – said, “What we got yesterday was the opposite of what [Obama] said is necessary to fix this problem.”  And Obama doesn’t just demonize his opponents; he falsely demonizes his opponents by telling demonstrable lies.

As I said, Obama is a fascist bully and a cynical demagogue.  And yet the mainstream media has the unmitigated chutzpah to continue to insanely depict this cynical, lying, hypocrite demagogue as an inspirational figure.

The American people and the mushroom have something in common: both are kept in the dark and fed manure.

So you can understand why the American people – for all the information available to them – are so terribly ignorant about just what the hell is going on in our political system.

But as misinformed and lied-to as Americans are when it comes to the sea of lies they are presented with as “news,” they are still aware that fewer of them have jobs, fewer of them have homes, their food cost more, their fuel cost more and that the quality of their lives are rapidly slipping away under the policies of a failed president and his failed party.

America’s Best Days
Those Confident That America’s Best Days Lie Ahead Down to 31%
Monday, April 25, 2011

Voter confidence that the nation’s best days are still to come has fallen to its lowest level ever.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that just 31% believe America’s best days are in the future. That’s down three points from last month and is the lowest result found in polling since late 2006.

Fifty-three percent (53%) believe America’s best days are in the past, also the highest measurement in over four years. Sixteen percent (16%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Separate polling finds that only 22% of Likely Voters believe the United States is now heading in the right direction. That ties the lowest level found during Barack Obama’s presidency.

While majorities of Republicans (68%) and voters not affiliated with either major political party (52%) believe America’s best days are in the past, a plurality of Democrats (45%) thinks its best days still lie ahead.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of white voters believe America’s best days have come and gone, but the same number of black voters (58%) feel the opposite is true.

[…]

And of course, it is true: America’s days truly ARE behind us as long as Barack Hussein Obama and as long as Democrats are able to continue to lead.  Either Democrats will go down, or America will go down.

But, liberals say, it was BUSH who made the economy fail.  Two things: 1) how many years should that line of garbage continue to succeed?  And 2) it was never true to begin with (also see here).

Do you know that Democrats had total control of both the House and the Senate from 2006 until 2010???

George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to warn Congress that unless we got control of the out-of-control Democrat-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the out-of-control housing and housing mortgage market that it was poisoning with piles of bad debt, our economy would go under.  The problem had festered because Bush had reappointed the first black Fannie Mae CEO because of political correctness.  Franklin Raines was a failure and a corrupt fraud who disguised massive debt.  Further, fearing the same political correctness, Republicans had allowed themselves to be repeatedly stymied in their attempts to reform the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie and Freddie as Democrats screamd “racism.”  John McCain was if anything even more clear in 2006 when there was still time to fix the developing crisis.  McCain wrote (in 2006):

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

McCain asked, “Who would actually pay this massive debt for these incredibly risky liberal policies if Fannie or Freddie could not?’  And we now have the answer to that question, don’t we???

Even the liberal New York Times recognized the threat posed by Fannie and Freddie.  And Peter Wallison all but predicted the collapse as early as 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

 The same Peter Wallison who had predicted the disaster from 1999 wrote a September 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”

Wallison was 100% correct, and had the FACT that he had accurately predicted the collapse to give him further credibility.  Democrats were 100% wrong.  Barney Frank was one of the unanimous Nazi-goosetepping Democrats who said stuff like this:

”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.”

Basically a MONTH before Fannie and Freddie went bankrupt and started the entire housing mortgage market collapse in 2008, Barney Frank was still singing the same idiotic tune:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

They’re in a housing market. I do think their prospects going forward are very solid.”

John McCain correctly predicted a disaster.  Barney Frank was still spouting outrageous lies just one month before the bottom fell out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and then caused the bottom to fall out of the entire economy.  Republicans were right and Democrats were disasterously wrong.  And the American people responded by electing Democrats and purging Republicans.  Because we were lied to, and because we have become a bad people who believe lies.

Democrats blocked every single move by both the Republicans and by George Bush.  They actually threatened filibusters to prevent Bush from fixing the broken system that failed and it was DEMOCRATS who took our economy down the drain.

And Senator Barack Obama had more campaign money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a shorter time than anyone in Congress.  And he also had more campaign money from Lehman Brothers – a dirty Wall Street player that went belly up – in a shorter time than anyone else in Congress.  Obama was bought and owned by the people who blew up our economy.

Only a nation of fools would have voted for this inexperienced Marxist fool to run our nation.  But a nation of fools believed the worst media propaganda campaign since Joseph Goebbels plied his trade.

Even fools feel pain when they keep getting burned, though.  And Obama is burning America alive.

We are slipping.  Even fools can feel it:

26 Apr, 2011, 11.27AM IST,IANS
China’s economy to surpass that of US by 2016: IMF

BEIJING: The Chinese economy will surpass that of the US by 2016, the International Monetary Fund ( IMF )) has predicted.According to the IMF’s forecast, based on “purchasing power parities”, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) will rise from $11.2 trillion in 2011 to $19 trillion in 2016, while the American economy will increase from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion.

China’s share of the global economy will ascend from 14 percent to 18 percent, while the US’ share will descend to 17.7 percent, China Daily reported.

The Economist had predicted in December 2010 that China would overtake the US in terms of nominal GDP in 2019.

 At the same time all of the other growing disasters is taking place, we have a crisis in the price of oil.  And Obama has done nothing but exacerbate that crisis with energy policies that are even more destructive than Jimmy Carter’s.

Do you feel your nation growing smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker?  That is the hope and change you voted for.

In the time that Obama has been president, we’ve gone from predicting China would overtake us by 2030, to 2019, to just five years away.  And mark my words, it will be moved up yet again, before they overtake Obama’s ignorant stupidity even faster than that.

Under Obama, and due to his immoral and criminally reckless policies, we are spending like fools and at the same time insanely inflating our money supply (under the euphamism of “qantitative easing” or QE2.  And here are the results:

APRIL 23, 2011
Dollar’s Decline Speeds Up, With Risks for U.S.
BY TOM LAURICELLA

The U.S. dollar’s downward slide is accelerating as low interest rates, inflation concerns and the massive federal budget deficit undermine the currency.

With no relief in sight for the dollar on any of those fronts, the downward pressure on the dollar is widely expected to continue.
The dollar fell nearly 1% against a broad basket of currencies this week, following a drop of similar size last week. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index closed at its lowest level since August 2008, before the financial crisis intensified.

“The dollar just hasn’t had anything positive going for it,” said Alessio de Longis, who oversees the Oppenheimer Currency Opportunities Fund.

Thanks to your fool-in-chief president, your dollar is worth less and less.  And your gas and your food cost more and more.  Food now costs more than at any time since 1974, thanks to the Democrat messiah.

Or maybe he’s not such a fool.  Because maybe this is what he wanted all along.  Read this article on “the Cloward and Piven Strategy” created by liberals/progressives to implode America written in 2008 (you could also read my own article written in 2009).  And then see what top SEIU official Steven Lerner – who left the “workers of the world unite; it’s not just a slogan anymore” radical union at the same time #1 White House visitor Andy Stern did – had to say about deliberately trying to cause a financial crisis that will implode America.

The United States of America is dangerously close to complete collapse.  One wrong move, one piece of bad news, just one thing, could send us into a collapse that will be impossible to stop.

And we are either being led by a total fool, or even worse, we are being led by a man who is actively plotting to collapse America to impose a radical leftwing ideology, and who doesn’t care one iota more about the American people than Adolf Hitler cared about the German people.

I’m sure you have probably picked up on my angry tone.  I am angry; I’m beyond angry.  Why?  Because I see the beast foretold by the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation coming.  I see the collapse coming, and the Antichrist riding in on his white horse to save the day.  And I see that the same liberals, the same progressives, the same Democrats who caused this collapse will be the ones to welcome this coming world dictator.  And it will be these same Democrats who call for the American people to take his mark on their hands or on their foreheads so that they can join the rest of the world and buy and sell.

Rest assured, Obama’s reckless fiscal policies are not just undermining America; they are undermining the entire world.  The unrest in the Middle East (which again says “Last days as foretold by the Bible” all over it) is directly attributed to Obama’s monetary policies, according to the G-2o and the central banks.

Barack Obama is a false messiah.  The Democrat Partyis the party of hell.  And they are leading us to hell on earth right now.  Today.

And we are voting for hell.

You mark my words.  It won’t be long now.  The beast is coming.  And if you vote Democrat, you have already voted for him by paving the way for his soon-arrival.

Get ready for hell.

More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

Who destroyed the economy in 2008?  Democrats say it was Bush.  Why?  Well, because he was president, that’s why.

Why – when applying the same logic – Barack Obama STILL isn’t responsible for any of his economic mess fully two years after George W. Bush left office is anybody’s guess.

But stop and think.  The primary cause for the 2008 economic meltdown was a downturn in the housing market and the underlying mortgage market.

At the core of that meltdown was GSEs (that’s “Government Sponsored Enterprises” to you) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has always been that it was – and remains – a social welfare institution masquerading as a financial institution.  And they have made beyond-godawful “financial” decisions because their true loyalty has always been with socialist policies rather than financial ones.

Let’s look at Fannie and Freddie’s current picture:

Fannie, Freddie’s $685B fix
Bloomberg
Last Updated: 11:54 PM, November 4, 2010
Posted: 11:54 PM, November 4, 2010

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage firms operating under federal conservatorship, may cost taxpayers as much as $685 billion as the US covers losses and overhauls the housing-finance system, Standard & Poor’s said.

Costs for resolving the two government-sponsored entities could reach $280 billion, including $148 billion already delivered under a US Treasury Department promise of unlimited support, New York-based S&P said yesterday in a research report. The government may spend an additional $405 billion to capitalize a replacement for the two companies, which own or insure more than half the US mortgage market.

“It appears unlikely in our view that housing and mortgage markets will be able to operate normally without continuing and substantial government involvement,” S&P said, citing the GSEs’ growing portfolio of unsold homes, a sluggish economy, high unemployment, the prospect of rising foreclosures and billions in legacy losses.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has said there is a strong case to be made for continued US involvement, has promised to deliver the Obama administration’s plan to overhaul the housing-finance system by the end of January. Republican lawmakers, who will take control of the House of Representatives in January, have called for the government to end its support for Washington-based Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of McLean, Va.

“Although federal authorities have taken no concrete public steps toward sponsoring a GSE alternative, Standard & Poor’s believes that it’s a useful exercise to consider how much such a recapitalization might cost taxpayers,” the report said.

$685 BILLION.  That’s quite a mess.

Did it just happen?  Hardly.  This was going on for years.  This was what caused the subprime crisis that destroyed our economy in 2008.

Let’s survey the record.  According to record provided by The New York Times, Fannie and Freddie were in huge trouble PRIOR TO the economic collapse.  And their holdings were so massive that there is simply no reasonable way that one can maintain that their crisis didn’t directly contribute to the greater crisis to be revealed.  Read the article dated July 11, 2008:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

A timeline of the subprime loan crisis of 2008 clearly reveals that it was Fannie Mae’s collapse that started the entire mess rolling downhill.  From Wikipedia:

September 2008

Main article: Global financial crisis in September 2008

• • September 7: Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which at that point owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.’s $12 trillion mortgage market, effectively nationalizing them. This causes panic because almost every home mortgage lender and Wall Street bank relied on them to facilitate the mortgage market and investors worldwide owned $5.2 trillion of debt securities backed by them.^[151][152]
  • September 14: Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America amidst fears of a liquidity crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse^[153]
  • September 15: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection^[154]
  • September 16: Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s downgrade ratings on AIG‘s credit on concerns over continuing losses to mortgage-backed securities, sending the company into fears of insolvency.^[155][156] In addition, the Reserve Primary Fund “breaks the buck” leading to a run on the money market funds. Over $140 billion is withdrawn vs. $7 billion the week prior. This leads to problems for the commercial paper market, a key source of funding for corporations, which suddenly could not get funds or had to pay much higher interest rates.^[157]
  • September 17: The US Federal Reserve lends $85 billion to American International Group (AIG) to avoid bankruptcy.
  • September 18: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke meet with key legislators to propose a $700 billion emergency bailout through the purchase of toxic assets. Bernanke tells them: “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.”^[158]
  • September 19: Paulson financial rescue plan is unveiled after a volatile week in stock and debt markets.

Democrats who bother to offer any reason at all why “Republicans got us into this mess” claim that the Republicans refused to regulate and reform the economic sector.

Well, let’s dig a little further.  Was it George Bush who refused to regulate or reform?

Hardly.

From US News & World Report:

Seventeen. That’s how many times, according to this White House statement (hat tip Gateway Pundit), that the Bush administration has called for tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That’s right.  George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to reform and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agencies at the epicenter of the economic crisis.

When did this thing start?  Under Bush?  Not according to The New York Times, as I have pointed out before in a previous article.

From the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

More.  Again from the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

What do we have, even in the pages of the New York Times?  A prediction that as soon as the economy cooled off, the mortgage market would explode like a depth charge and the government would have to step in to prevent a catastrophe.  And from a Clinton program, at that.

The same man – Peter Wallison – who had predicted the disaster from 1999 wrote a September 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”

So this disaster began under Bill Clinton.  Specifically, it began in the very final years of the Clinton administration.  Interestingly, at the same time that the Dot-com bubble was getting ready to explode on Clinton’s watch.  Clinton got all the credit for a great economy, and Bush got to watch 78% of the value of Nasdaq destroyed just as he was taking office.  $7.1 TRILLION in wealth was vaporized (43% of the the Market Capitalization of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Full Cap between 2000 Q1 and Q1 2003).  Bill Clinton handed George Bush a massive economic disaster (made even worse by the shocking 9/11 attacks), and Bush turned economic calamity into the longest consecutive period of job growth (52 straight months) in history.  In diametrical contradiction to all the lies that you have  heard from Democrats and from a mainstream media propaganda machine that often puts Joseph Goebbels to shame

What did George W. Bush do to deal with the necessary regulation and reform of these government-subsidized behemoths Fannie and Freddie?

Read what the New York Times said back in September 11, 2003:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— 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.

So Bush WANTED to regulate and reform the industry that would destroy the economy five years later, again, in contradiction to a blatantly dishonest and ideologically liberal and biased media.  Bush didn’t “refuse to regulate.”  Bush TRIED to provide the necessary regulatory steps that could have averted disaster.

And who blocked those regulations and reforms that Bush tried to provide?  None other than Barney Frank and his Democrat buddies:

”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.

Democrats blocked reform and regulation of Fannie and Freddie.  They threatened to filibuster any attempt at regulation and reform.  Meanwhile John McCain wrote a letter in 2006 urging reform and regulation of the GSEs.  He said:

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

And it came to pass exactly as John McCain warned.

Because of Democrats.  Who were virtually entirely to blame for the disaster that ensued as a result of their blocking of reform and regulation.

What did Democrats do with the mainstream media’s culpability?  They falsely dropped the crisis at the feet of “greedy” Wall Street.  But while examples of Wall Street greed abound, the liberal intelligentsia deliberately overlooked the central and preceding role of Democrat-dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here’s how the mess actually happened:

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, in their role as Government Sponsored Enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again, are Government Sponsored Enterprises.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, any intelligent observer should note a primary conflict that amounts to a fundamental hypocritical contradiction: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet at the same time they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what allowed the toxic instruments that have been sold across the world to proliferate.  And then to explode.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

And it was Democrats, not Bush, and not Republicans, who were all over this disaster that destroyed our economy in 2008.

We were led by a pathologically dishonest media to believe that Republicans had created this mess, when it fact it had been Democrats.  And so we gave the very fools who destroyed our economy total power.

And what have they done in the two years since?

They made bad far, far worse.

Hypocrite-in-Chief Seeks Line Item Veto He Blocked Bush From Getting

This is pretty massive hypocrisy even coming from a world-class hypocrite:

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Obama asks Hill for line-item veto he once opposed
Stephen Dinan

When President George W. Bush called for a kind of line-item veto four years ago, the top Senate Democrat said it was like getting a “bad sore throat,” and the No. 2 House Democrat called it “a sham.” On Monday, President Obama asked them to reconsider and pass something very similar, for his sake.

With fears of a Greek-style debt collapse roiling a Congress already balking at new spending, the White House on Monday proposed a modified line-item veto that would give the administration another crack at forcing Congress to vote on spending cuts.

But the proposal will have to pass a Congress wary of giving up power over the purse, and would require a reversal by many Democrats who voted against a similar proposal from Mr. Bush.

One who’s already reversed himself is Mr. Obama, who as a senator in 2007 voted along with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., now the vice president, and almost all of the rest of Senate Democrats to filibuster Mr. Bush’s proposal.

The White House said Mr. Obama embraced line-item powers by the time he won the White House, and that times are bad enough that Congress may now be ready to follow his lead.

“The fiscal context has changed as it became necessary to combat a severe economic downturn and as ongoing deficits have become a growing concern,” Peter R. Orszag, Mr. Obama’s budget director, told reporters. “We are hopeful the Congress will enact this legislation because it will help everyone to reduce unnecessary spending.”

He said the new presidential powers could encourage Congress to scrutinize spending bills more carefully, because lawmakers wouldn’t want to be shamed by having their projects singled out.

What is really amazing is the argument that Obama is giving to justify giving him a line-item veto: we’ve got a growing crisis, and the president needs this tool to avert it.

By Obama’s very own reasoning, he and the Democrat Party are fundamentally responsible for the 2008 economic collapse.  Because had they given Bush this power, he could have averted the disaster – but they refused to give him the necessary power he needed.

A couple of quotes from US News & World Report must suffice to illustrate:

Seventeen. That’s how many times, according to this White House statement (hat tip Gateway Pundit), that the Bush administration has called for tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. […]

… But it didn’t prevent them from spewing a huge amount of toxic waste, in the form of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, into our financial institutions from 2004 to 2007. As Stephen Spruiell points out in The Corner on National Review Online, Fannie and Freddie spewed out $1 trillion worth (face value) of subprime mortgages between 2005 and 2007. That’s a whole lot of toxic waste. For more detail, consult the items referred to in my previous blogpost on this subject (most of the comments seem to have been disputes about the plot line of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, which I should think could be settled by consulting a reference work).

Much if not all of that could have been prevented by a bill cosponsored by John McCain and supported by all the Republicans and opposed by all the Democrats in the Senate Banking Committee in 2005. That bill, which the Democrats stopped from passing, would have prohibited the GSEs from speculating on the mortgage-based securities they packaged. The GSEs’ mission allegedly justifying their quasi-governmental status was to package or securitize such mortgages, but the lion’s share of their profits—which determined top executives’ bonuses—came from speculation.

And there’s your 2008 mortgage meltdown, in a nutshell.  Bush warned and warned and warned about the impending crisis, to no avail.  Because the same Democrats who refused to give Bush the power Obama now says he needs to avert disaster refused to heed Bush’s warnings, and kept pushing us closer and closer and closer to the implosion point.  And then we imploded just as Bush had said we would.

I have always believed that the president should have a line-item veto – with the proviso that every line item veto be made a matter of public record so the American people could know what items the president was removing and who had installed those items in the first place.

This is just another of many, many proofs regarding what a gargantuan hypocrite slimeball the current occupant of the White House truly is.

But, for what it’s worth, it is probably unfair to single out Barack Obama as a slimeball, when so many of his fellow Democrats are also slimeballs.  Near the conclusion of the Washington Times article, we have this:

House Budget Committee Chairman John M. Spratt Jr., South Carolina Democrat, said he will take the lead in introducing Mr. Obama’s proposal in Congress, calling it “a step forward on the path to fiscal responsibility.”

Mr. Spratt led opposition to the 2006 Bush proposal.

At some point they should just call themselves the Demagogue Party and dispense with the pretenses as to what they truly are.

How’s Obama Doing In Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq? Not So Good

Let’s take them in alphabetical order.  First, How’s Obama doing in Afghanistan?

Not so good.  Our foreign policy is so deteriorated there that Obama is refusing to even acknowledge whether or not the leader of the country we are fighting in is an ally:

White House won’t say if Karzai is still an ally
By Jordan Fabian & Sam Youngman – 04/06/10 02:00 PM ET

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs would not say Tuesday if the Obama administration considers Afghan President Hamid Karzai an ally.

Gibbs criticized the Afghan president after Karzai took a shot at Western leaders and the United Nations for election fraud in his country during last year’s presidential contest.

Administration officials said Tuesday that they will continue to “evaluate” remarks made by  Karzai, and that the evaluation could result in Karzai’s May invitation to the White House being revoked.

President Barack Obama extended an invitation for Karzai to visit the White House on May 12, but that could be in jeopardy if Karzai continues to make “troubling and untruthful” comments.

Asked at the daily press briefing if the U.S. considers Karzai an ally, Gibbs said “Karzai is the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.”

Pressed on the issue, Gibbs said that “the remarks he’s made I can’t imagine that anyone in this country found them anything other than troubling…when the Afghan leaders take steps to improve governance and root out corruption, then the president will say kind words.”

Gibbs added that the administration will continue to use “stern language” with Karzai if it doesn’t take steps to root out corruption and questioned the rationale behind Karzai’s controversial statements.

“Whether there’s some domestic political benefit that he’s trying to gain, I can’t say,” Gibbs said.

So Karzai defends his country’s elections, and his own political credibility, from foreign attacks and demagoguery, and as a result Obama snubs him in what seems like a rather petty emotional response.

Maybe Karzai should start meddling in Obama’s election-status by pointing out that Obama’s own wife strongly suggested Obama was not born in the United States when she remarked that she and Obama visited “his home country in Kenya.”  Which of course is what the birthers who say Obama was not an American-born U.S. citizen have been saying all along.  Even the Associated Press at one point described Obama as “Kenyan-born” before it became inconvenient to so-describe him.

Given that Obama is becoming unglued over Karzai defending himself over attacks regarding the legitimacy of his election, it would be interesting if we could see how Obama would handle attacks over the legitimacy of his election.

In any event, things aren’t going so well when we have hundreds of thousands of troops fighting in a country while our president openly doubts whether the leader of said country is an ally.

That was the first thing that went truly, truly wrong in Vietnam, you know.

How’s Obama doing in Iran?  Really, really bad.  It has become abundantly obvious that Iran WILL have nuclear weapons under Obama’s watch.

How does this Washington Times headline grab you?

CIA: Iran capable of producing nukes

And what is Obama’s reaction to this intolerable and incredibly dangerous development?  Try acceptance.

I know, I know.  Iran was supposed to reflect upon the sheer, transcendent wonderfulness of Obama, and agree that Obama’s empty words really were more important than reality, and abandon it’s nuclear weapons program.  But somehow something went wrong in Obama’s calculation that Iran and the ayatollahs would decide to embrace Obama’s narcissism.

Who would have ever thunk it?

Oh, wait.  I would have.  I wrote an article in August, 2008 patiently explaining why a vote for Obama was tantamount to a vote for a nuclear-armed Iran.

In another August 2008 article predicting that “President Obama” equaled “nuclear Iran,” I wrote:

This is the question that will effect – and possibly haunt – American foreign policy for generations to come.

If we elect Barack Obama, we are tacitly choosing to allow Iran to develop the bomb. Any of his tough-sounding rhetoric aside, you need to realize that Barack Obama has already repeatedly philosophically condemned the very same sort of preemptive attack that would be necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Heck, I can go back to April 2008, when I was already explaining why electing either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton over John McCain guaranteed a nuclear-armed Iran.

When Iran obtains nuclear weapons, the world will dramatically change.  We will not be able to control this rogue terrorist nation – a nation with a radically apocalyptic view of the world – which has repeatedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.”  When Iran develops the bomb, they will be able to block the Strait of Hormuz and shut off the oil supply, skyrocketing gasoline prices to over $14 a gallon.  When Iran gets nukes, it will be able to launch a global terrorist jihad without fear of being attacked.  When Iran has the bomb, it will result in a nuclear-arms race in the craziest region in the history of the world.

Ultimate Armageddon will be guaranteed when Iran gets the bomb.  And it will get the bomb because of Barack Hussein Obama.

How about Iraq?  Well, things are hardly looking up there under Obama, either.

A few weeks ago, Joe Biden was ridiculously asserting that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”  What was asinine about that statement was that it utterly ignored the Bush administration, that deserves all the credit, and instead assign credit to two men who foolishly tried to undercut everything that Bush did which led to the success we attained in Iraq.

But things were clearly going well in Iraq, such that Joe Biden tried to steal credit for it.

Not so much now.

From the New York Times:

Baghdad Bombing Streak Stokes Fear of New Round of Sectarian Violence
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and YASMINE MOUSA
Published: April 6, 2010

BAGHDAD — Deadly blasts shook Baghdad for the second time in three days on Tuesday, deepening fears of a new outbreak of insurgent and sectarian violence.

At least seven bombings of residential areas of the Iraqi capital, both Shiite and Sunni, killed 35 people and wounded more than 140. The violence came against a backdrop of continuing political instability after March 7 parliamentary elections left no single group able to form a government, forcing a scramble to form coalitions.

A similar political void after the 2005 parliamentary vote preceded Iraq’s bloody sectarian warfare of 2006 and 2007, from which the country has only begun to emerge.

There are also new concerns that Iraq’s army and police may drift back into sectarianism.

It’s logically impossible for the Obama administration to one day say Iraq will be one of their “greatest achievements,” and the next day blame Bush for the failure of Iraq.  That said, I guarantee you that that is precisely what Obama will try to do if Iraq turns sour on him.

Ayad Allawi, the likely next prime minister of Iraq, had this to say only yesterday:

ALLAWI: The process of democracy where you would have a stable Iraq is being hijacked.  And because it’s being hijacked, it’s going to throw this country into violence. And once this country is thrown again into violence as before, then this will spill over to the region and vice versa. Problems around the region will be transferred here also.

I bold and red-font the statements that it is “being” hijacked.  It is something that is beginning to happen just now.  And Iraq is being “thrown again into violence as before.”  Obama can’t blame Bush for this increasing violence.  He can only blame himself (not that he ever actually WILL blame himself).

We are beginning to escalate our withdrawal out of Iraq, and lo and behold, the Islamic jihadists are determined to make it appear as though we are withdrawing with our tails between our legs.  They are also making it rather obvious that when we leave, they will be present to fill the newly created vacuum with their poisonous presence.

Allawi is pleading with the United States to discontinue the timetable for withdrawal and remain through this difficult period.  But the report by correspondent Dominic Di-Natale concludes by saying, “Ayad Allawi’s call for a troop withdrawal suspension will fall on deaf ears for the time being even if it is a serious plea for help. ”

One of the fears is that Obama is tunnel-vision focused on getting the hell out of Iraq, and is ignoring the delicate state-of-affairs there.

So how’s Obama doing in Afghanistan, in Iran, and in Iraq?  Pretty darn horrendously.

An article that encapsulates the Obama disaster of a foreign policy is “The Karzai Fiasco” by the Wall Street Journal.

Hillary Clinton Tacitly Acknowledges Obama Administration Has Failed With Iran

Remember a shameless Bill Clinton telling us “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” as he tried to wriggle out of his lies?

He won politically, as he was able to remain Liar-in-Chief.  But he lost factually, as he was deemed unfit to practice law, and had to surrender his law license.

There’s a joke that goes, “What do you call a million attorneys at the bottom of the ocean?  A good start.”  Well, Bill Clinton proved himself to be such a weasel that he wasn’t even fit to pursue the weasel’s favorite profession.

Well, the meaning is considerably more clear with Bill’s wife’s repeated usage of participles.  As in, “Iran is becoming a military dictatorship”; as in “Iran is sliding into a military dictatorship”; as in “an ever-dimming outlook for persuading Iran”; as in “Iran is increasingly dominated by the Revolutionary Guard Corps”; as in this increasing decision-making (by the Revolutionary Guard)”; as in “in effect supplanting the government of Iran.”

As in, words and their tenses are actually important.  All this “becoming” and “sliding” and “ever-dimming” and “supplanting” is in the tense of the present active participle.  Which is to say that it didn’t occur in the past while George Bush was president; it is something that is happening right now, under the failed presidency and the failed foreign policy of Barack Obama.

Clinton: Iran is becoming a military dictatorship
By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer Robert Burns, Ap National Security Writer   – 1 hr 21 mins ago

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday Iran is sliding into a military dictatorship, a new assessment suggesting a rockier road ahead for U.S.-led efforts to stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

As the first high-level Obama administration official to make such an accusation, Clinton was reflecting an ever-dimming outlook for persuading Iran to negotiate limits on its nuclear program, which it has insisted is intended only for peaceful purposes. The U.S. and others — including the two Gulf countries Clinton visited Sunday and Monday — believe Iran is headed for a nuclear bomb capability. […]

Earlier in the day, in Doha, Qatar, Clinton spoke bluntly about Iranian behavior and what she called the Obama administration’s view of Iran as increasingly dominated by the Revolutionary Guard Corps. […]

The Revolutionary Guard has long been a pillar of Iran’s regime as a force separate from the ordinary armed forces. The Guard now has a hand in every critical area, including missile development, oil resources, dam building, road construction, telecommunications and nuclear technology.

It also has absorbed the paramilitary Basij as a full-fledged part of its command structure — giving the militia greater funding and a stronger presence in Iran’s internal politics.

“The evidence we’ve seen of this increasing decision-making (by the Revolutionary Guard) cuts across all areas of Iranian security policy, and certainly nuclear policy is at the core of it,” Clinton told reporters flying with her from Doha to Saudi Arabia.

Asked if the U.S. was planning a military attack on Iran, Clinton said “no.”

The United States is focused on gaining international support for sanctions “that will be particularly aimed at those enterprises controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, which we believe is in effect supplanting the government of Iran,” she said. […]

Private U.S. experts on the Iranian regime said they agreed with Clinton’s assessment of Iran’s drift toward military dominance.

“When you rely on the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to remain in power it is only a matter of time before the regime becomes a paramilitary dictatorship — and it is about time we realize this,” Iranian-born Fariborz Ghadar, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an e-mail to The AP. He said the current regime is “beholden to the Revolutionary Guard for its survival.”

Ray Takeyh, a former administration adviser on Iran who now follows Iranian developments from the private Council on Foreign Relations, said by e-mail, “The Revolutionary Guards are increasingly represented in all aspects of governance.”

Clinton told reporters it appears the Revolutionary Guard is in charge of Iran’s controversial nuclear program and the country changing course “depends on whether the clerical and political leadership begin to reassert themselves.”

She added: “I’m not predicting what will happen but I think the trend with this greater and greater military lock on leadership decisions should be disturbing to Iranians as well as those of us on the outside.”

Clinton said the Iran that could emerge is “a far cry from the Islamic Republic that had elections and different points of view within the leadership circle. That is part of the reason that we are so concerned with what we are seeing going on there.”

In her Doha appearance, Clinton also said she foresees a possible breakthrough soon in stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“I’m hopeful that this year will see the commencement of serious negotiations that will cover every issue that is outstanding,” she said, adding that “everyone is anticipating” progress after more than a year of impasse between the negotiating parties. […]

And we have a clue as to how “hopey changey” relates to Obama foreign policy:

From Secretary Clinton: “I’m hopeful that this year will see the commencement of serious negotiations that will cover every issue that is outstanding,” she said, adding that “everyone is anticipating” progress after more than a year of impasse between the negotiating parties.

And a Haaretz article provides us with more “hope n’ change”:

We have Vice President Biden: “Referring to U.S.-led effort to force new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, Biden told Meet the Press on Sunday that he hoped to recruit China’s support to the campaign.”

We have JCS Chairman Admiral Mullen: “He added that he still hoped a solution could be found through diplomacy and sanctions, and that there would not be a regional war.”

I am personally very hopeful that magic unicorns will fly over Iran and melt the mullahs’ heart with their rainbow sprinkles.  And my hope for change is no less ridiculous than the three above.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy is so desperately failed that they are now incredibly trying to claim credit for the Bush victory in Iraq which they did everything they could to prevent.

Thirteen months and counting, Barry Hussein has still not lived up to his promise of personally sitting down with the Ayatollah without preconditions and discussing why the latter wants to exterminate the state of Israel as a precursor to destroying the “Great Satan” America.

Barry Hussein’s foreign policy was so shockingly bad and so woefully pathetic that even then-candidate for president Hillary Clinton said he was “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

But now “naive and irresponsible” is the law of the land.  And Obama’s Good Ship Lollipop is steaming toward a nuclear-armed Iranian rogue regime.

As Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Iran is now a nuclear state.” Which shortly follows their demonstration that they are well on their way to being an intercontinental ballistic missile state to deliver their nukes, too.

French President Sarkozy said that we haven’t gained anything whatsoever from Obama’s “irresponsible and frankly naive” policy of dialogue with Iran “but more enriched uranium and centrifuges.”

He has also said, ““We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

But not in Hopey Changey Land.

There wasn’t a single carbon-based conservative on the planet who didn’t say that Obama’s irresponsible and naive policy would utterly fail.  And surprise, surprise, it’s utterly failed.

You mark my words.  Due to Barack Obama’s irresponsible, naive, and failed leadership, Iran WILL obtain nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them.  And as a result of Iran’s successful defiance of Obama, the Sunni Arab world WILL develop their own nuclear weapons and ignite a terrifying new nuclear arms race in the most insane region in the history of the planet.

In addition to that terrifying outcome, Iran will have the capability to do any of the following:

1) Start a global nuclear holocaust in order to force the appearance of the Twelfth Imam.  Mutually Assured Destruction may very well play no part in the Iranian leaderships’ apocalyptic worldview.

2) Invade Israel with their nuclear weapons as a protective shield against Israel’s “Samson option.”  Iran would have numerous Islamic allies to attack with them.

3) Shut down the Strait of Hormuz and send oil prices (and therefore the cost of just about everything else that requires energy to produce) into the stratosphere.

4) Massively increase global terrorism with impunity.  If Iranian-trained or based jihadists manage another massive 9/11, what will we do if going to war will mean the destruction of several U.S. cities and millions of dead Americans?

Allow me to restate something I wrote back in April of 2008 (and cited again in December of last year):

A President John McCain can assure the Iranians, “We attacked Iraq when we believed they represented a threat to us, and we will do the same to you. You seriously might want to rethink your plans.” A President John McCain can say to Sunni Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, “We have stood by Iraq even when it was difficult, and we will do the same for you. You don’t need those weapons; the United States will be there for you.”

Barack Obama can’t do any of that.  He won’t go to war with Iran to stop their nuclear weapons program (did you notice Hillary Clinton’s “NO” to the question whether the US was planning any sort of attack?).  He can’t assure Arab allies that they can completely count on him to protect them.  And he is therefore completely powerless and completely useless.

Liberals will naturally (being deceitful, dishonest, and demagogic) want to blame George Bush for not dealing with Iran.  But an article from the Los Angeles Times from December of 2007 underscores why Bush was not able to mobilize America against the building Iranian threat.  In a word, it was DEMOCRATS:

“DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.

While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.”

George Bush believed Iran was a threat that needed to be confronted.  Democrats like Barack Obama shrilly screamed him down.  This is therefore genuinely Barry Hussein’s mess, and it has become increasingly obvious that doesn’t have the stones to handle it.

America’s failure to wisely choose its 44th president leaves us in the greatest crisis we have ever known, both domestically and internationally.

And when the fecal matter hits the rotary oscillator, there won’t be anybody to bail us out.

Obama Now Pimps Same Spending Freeze He Attacked As Candidate

Chutzpah alert.  Get out those emergency barf buckets and assume the emergency vomiting position.  Your president is speaking.

Obama – who got punched hard in the gonads when even the citizens of uber-lib MASSACHUSETTS rejected his idiotic policies – is going to announce a policy which he personally ATTACKED his rival over during the campaign.

From the Politico:

Barack Obama flatly rejected an across-the-board spending freeze when John McCain advanced the idea during the last debate of 2008 held at Long Island’s Hofstra University.

Times have changed — the October debate came in the midst of the financial crisis — but Obama rejected the idea, which he now sees as a first step to fiscal discipline. Then and now, he rejects McCain’s broad freeze as a fiscal “hatchet” — as opposed to the thus-far unspecified non-security freeze he’s planning now

MCCAIN: OK, what — what would I cut? I would have, first of all, across-the-board spending freeze, OK? Some people say that’s a hatchet. That’s a hatchet, and then I would get out a scalpel, OK?

Because we’ve got — we have presided over the largest increase — we’ve got to have a new direction for this country. We have presided over the largest increase in government since the Great Society.

Government spending has gone completely out of control; $10 trillion dollar debt we’re giving to our kids, a half-a-trillion dollars we owe China. [snip]

OBAMA: Well, look, I think that we do have a disagreement about an across-the-board spending freeze. It sounds good. It’s proposed periodically. It doesn’t happen.

And, in fact, an across-the-board spending freeze is a hatchet, and we do need a scalpel, because there are some programs that don’t work at all. There are some programs that are underfunded. And I want to make sure that we are focused on those programs that work.

If “it doesn’t happen,” then why are you proposing it now, Barry Hussein, you liar?  Because you are a cynical hypocrite whose trying to play games and pretend your a “fiscal conservative” now, that’s why.

The last year has proven you aren’t a “conservative” anything.  And the only thing “fiscal” you are is “out-of-control irresponsible.”

Now, John McCain would have begun his presidency with this freeze.  Barack Obama has a deficit of $1.3 TRILLION, and starts talking fiscal sanity only after getting his head handed to him by Scott Brown.

The only difference between 2008 and now is this:

This isn’t Barack Obama being honest.  The “honest” Obama spent trillions of dollars that your children’s grandchildren’s grandchildren will never be able to hope to repay.  This is Obama the ass in the cartoon above looking at what’s coming and hoping he can distract the American people with more of his lies.

Let’s see why that deficit rose so fast:

The federal budget deficit has already risen by $880 billion to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion. Most of the increase is attributable to recent increases in federal spending, including Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in “the long run,” and which ended welfare reform, destroyed thousands of jobs in the export sector, and substituted welfare for productive investments.

And how much of a “freeze” are we talking about after all of Obama’s spending binges?

Not much:

The savings would be small at first, perhaps $10 billion to $15 billion, one official said. But over the coming decade, savings could add up to $250 billion

Please keep in mind that Obama himself raised discretionary spending by $140 billion in the brief time he’s been if office.  And now he’s going to cut it by $10 billion?  I faint with excitement!!!

Some mainstream pundits are saying that Obama is moving to the right, because they know that that is what Americans want to hear.  But this isn’t a move to the right; it’s barely a head fake to the right.

This isn’t a cut; it’s the incredibly cynical appearance of a cut.  It’s an illusion.  Sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out: “It’s not a hatchet, it’s not a scalpel.  it’s a Q-tip.”  He said, in light of the never-before-seen-in-the-history-of-the-human-race-sized $1.3 trillion Obama deficit, “It’s a rounding error; it’s lunch money.”

Your way to generous, Charles.  It’s Twinkie money, at best.

AEI Article: How Fannie And Freddie Blew Up The Economy

Below is a very good article that everyone should read to better understand why the economy imploded in 2008: it was as a result of literally decades of risky and in frankly socialist decisions implemented primarily by GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But allow me to say a few words before getting to the full article.

I compiled the following to respond to the typical liberal charge that “the economic collapse in 2008 was Bush’s fault”:

The Democrat Party/lamestream media narrative is that Bush was responsible for the economic meltdown because it “happened during his watch.” There was never once a mention that it happened during Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s watch. Because that particular narrative doesn’t fit their leftist agenda.

I can very easily explain why Democrats were the primary cause of the 2008 collapse.

I can even give you the story in video, namely an 11 minute video titled “Burning Down the House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis?”

Or how about watching John Stossel explain what happened in a 5 1/2 minute ABC 20/20 piece?

Do you really want to know the true origins of the financial collapse? Then please do a little reading and start learning. The mortgage market collapsed in 2008 because of its biggest player: Fannie Mae, which held some 60% of the mortgages. And Democrats were entirely behind the policies that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae and the private mortgage industry that bought Fannie’s mortgage-backed securities. Investors were falsely led to believe that the bonds they were buying were guaranteed implicitly by the federal government.

Here are the words of Mortimer Zuckerman – a liberal, an Obama supporter, a billionaire, a trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the owner of a couple major news sources:

What about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that got there with the support of the Democrats in Congress. That’s what kicked off the great housing bubble; that’s what started this whole thing rolling down the hill. Did they ever talk about that kind of excess in the congress? No…..this isn’t something that is just due to the “Wall Street community”.

George Bush called for reform of the housing finance market 17 times in 2008 alone — and Democrats ignored him. They had been blocking his every effort to prevent disaster ever since Bush first tried to do so beginning in 2003. At that time, Democrat Barney Frank led the effort to block reform, saying:

”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.”

George Bush and John McCain repeatedly warned that if we didn’t address the situation, we would suffer a financial collapse.

John McCain wrote an urgent letter in 2006 that read:

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.

John McCain signed another letter that ended with these words:

With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

Substantial testimony calling for improved regulation of the GSEs has been provided to the Senate by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, HUD, GAO, CBO, and others. Congress has the opportunity to recommit itself to the housing mission of the GSEs while at the same time making sure the GSEs operate in a manner that does not expose our financial system, or taxpayers, to unnecessary risk. It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail. We strongly support an effort to schedule floor time this year to debate GSE regulatory reform.

And they DID fail. They massively, massively failed.

Only about a month before the whole system crashed, Barney Frank went on the record and said this:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.”

They sure were, you fat, miserable, loathsome, obscene, disgusting, slobbering, lying toad.

The top three headlines under the Google search “Fannie Mae collapse”:

Freddie, Fannie Scam Hidden in Broad Daylight

Financial Markets Reeling from Fannie & Freddie Collapse and Evitable Government Bailout

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Too big not to fail

But as our economy exploded along with the boondoggle housing finance market artificially sustained by Fannie and Freddie, the Democrats demagogued the Republicans. And the lamestream media duly reported it as though it were all the liberal’s-god-socialist-big-government’s truth.

So to answer your question, it was DEMOCRATS who led us into this mess. Just as it is DEMOCRATS who are now making the mess far worse.

I would point out in addition that Republicans deserve condemnation because they lacked the political courage and the political will to oppose enormously risky Democrat policies rather than face the demagoguery that they were “racist” for not allowing low-income minorities to own their own homes.  So they allowed the Democrats to keep expanding the Community Reinvestment Act, and allowed them to keep expanding the portfolio of Government Supported Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The following AEI article from Peter Wallison and Charles Calomiris is also available as a PDF file.

The Last Trillion-Dollar Commitment
The Destruction of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
By Peter J. Wallison, Charles W. Calomiris  |  AEI Online
(September 2008)

The government takeover of Fannie and Freddie was necessary because of their massive losses on more than $1 trillion of subprime and Alt-A investments.

The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was necessary because of their massive losses on more than $1 trillion of subprime and Alt-A investments, almost all of which were added to their single-family book of business between 2005 and 2007. The most plausible explanation for the sudden adoption of this disastrous course–disastrous for them and for the U.S. financial markets–is their desire to continue to retain the support of Congress after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004 and the challenges to their business model that ensued. Although the strategy worked–Congress did not adopt strong government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) reform legislation until the Republicans demanded it as the price for Senate passage of a housing bill in July 2008–it led inevitably to the government takeover and the enormous junk loan losses still to come.

Now that the federal government has been required to take effective control of Fannie and Freddie and to decide their fate, it is important to understand the reasons for their financial collapse–what went wrong and why. In his statement on September 7 announcing the appointment of a conservator for the two enterprises, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson pointed to their failed business models as the reason for their collapse. This was certainly a contributing element, but not the direct cause. The central problem was their dependence on Congress for continued political support in the wake of their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004. To curry favor with Congress, they sought substantial increases in their support of affordable housing, primarily by investing in risky and substandard mortgages between 2005 and 2007.

As GSEs, Fannie and Freddie were serving two masters in two different ways. The first was an inherent conflict between their government mission and their private ownership. The government mission required them to keep mortgage interest rates low and to increase their support for affordable housing. Their shareholder ownership, however, required them to fight increases in their capital requirements and regulation that would raise their costs and reduce their risk-taking and profitability. But there were two other parties–Congress and the taxpayers–that also had a stake in the choices that Fannie and Freddie made. Congress got some benefits in the form of political support from the GSEs’ ability to hold down mortgage rates, but it garnered even more political benefits from GSE support for affordable housing. The taxpayers got highly attenuated benefits from both affordable housing and lower mortgage rates but ultimately faced enormous liabilities associated with GSE risk-taking. This Outlook tells the disheartening story of how the GSEs sold out the taxpayers by taking huge risks on substandard mortgages, primarily to retain congressional support for the weak regulation and special benefits that fueled their high profits and profligate executive compensation. As if that were not enough, in the process, the GSEs’ operations promoted a risky subprime mortgage binge in the United States that has caused a worldwide financial crisis.

The special relationship with Congress was the GSEs’ undoing because it allowed them to escape the market discipline–the wariness of lenders–that keeps corporate managements from taking unacceptable risks.

The peculiar structure of the GSEs–shareholder-owned companies with a public mission–reflected a serious confusion of purpose on the part of the Lyndon Johnson administration and the members of Congress who created this flawed structure in 1968. In seeking to reduce the budget deficits associated with the Vietnam War and Great Society programs, the administration hit upon the idea of “privatizing” Fannie Mae by allowing the company to sell shares to the public. This, according to the budget theories of the time, would take Fannie’s expenditures off-budget, while allowing it to continue its activities with funds borrowed in the public credit markets. But turning Fannie into a wholly private company was not acceptable either. Various special provisions were placed in Fannie’s congressional charter that intentionally blurred the line between a public instrumentality and a private corporation. Among these provisions: Fannie was given a line of credit at the Treasury; the president could appoint five members of its board of directors; and its debt could be used, like Treasury debt, to collateralize government deposits in private banks.

Fannie’s congressional charter and its unusual ties to the government ensured that the market would recognize its status as a government instrumentality: that despite its private ownership, the company was performing a government mission. Because it was highly unlikely that the U.S. government would allow one of its instrumentalities to default on its obligations, Fannie was perceived in the capital markets to have at least an implicit government backing and was thus able to borrow funds at rates that were only slightly higher than those paid by the U.S. Treasury on its own debt offerings. In 1970, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board created Freddie Mac to assist federal savings and loan associations in marketing their mortgages; Freddie was also allowed to sell shares to the public in 1989 and became a competitor of Fannie Mae under a congressional charter that established an identical special relationship with the government.

The special relationship, codified by these unique charters, required the GSEs to pursue another inherently conflicted mission that pitted their shareholders against the taxpayers. To the extent that their government backing allowed the GSEs to take excessive financial risks, it was the taxpayers and not the shareholders who would ultimately bear the costs. That result–the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk–has now come to pass. U.S. taxpayers are now called upon to fill in the hole that reckless and improvident investment activity–fueled by inexpensive and easily accessible funds–has created in the GSEs’ balance sheets. The special relationship was also the GSEs’ undoing, because it allowed them to escape the market discipline–the wariness of lenders–that keeps corporate managements from taking unacceptable risks. Normally, when a privately held company is backed by the government (for example, in the case of commercial banks covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), regulation is the way that the government protects the taxpayers against the loss of market discipline. When Fannie Mae was privatized in 1968, however, no special regulatory structure was created to limit the taxpayers’ exposure to loss. The Johnson administration officials who structured the privatization may not have realized that they were creating what we recognize today as a huge moral hazard, but when Fannie became insolvent (the first time) in the high-interest-rate environment of the early 1980s, policymakers recognized that the company represented a potential risk to taxpayers.

In 1991, as Congress finally began the process of developing a regulatory regime for the GSEs, congressional interest in supporting affordable housing was growing. At this point, Fannie Mae initiated its first foray into affordable housing–a relatively small $10 billion program, probably intended to show Congress that the GSEs would support affordable housing without a statutory mandate. Nevertheless, Congress added an affordable housing “mission” to the GSE charters when it created their first full-time regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO). The new agency had only limited regulatory authority. It was also housed in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had no regulatory experience, and it was funded by congressional appropriations, allowing the GSEs to control their regulator through the key lawmakers who held OFHEO’s purse strings.

The new affordable housing mission further increased the congressional policy stake in the GSEs, but it also initiated a destructive mutual dependency: Congress began to rely on Fannie and Freddie for political and financial support, and the two GSEs relied on Congress to protect their profitable special privileges. In later years, attention to the political interests of Congress became known at the GSEs as “management of political risk.” In a speech to an investor conference in 1999, Franklin Raines, then Fannie’s chairman, assured them that “[w]e manage our political risk with the same intensity that we manage our credit and interest rate risks.”[1]

Benefits to Congress

Managing their political risk required the GSEs to offer Congress a generous benefits package. Campaign contributions were certainly one element. Between the 2000 and 2008 election cycles, the GSEs and their employees contributed more than $14.6 million to the campaign funds of dozens of senators and representatives, most of them on committees that were important to preserving the GSEs’ privileges.[2] And Fannie knew how to “leverage” its giving, not just its assets; often it enlisted other groups that profited from the GSEs’ activities–the securities industry, homebuilders, and realtors–to sponsor their own fundraising events for the GSEs’ key congressional friends. In addition to campaign funds, the GSEs–Fannie Mae in particular–enhanced their power in Congress by setting up “partnership offices” in the districts and states of important lawmakers, often hiring the relatives of these lawmakers to staff the local offices. Their lobbying activities were legendary. Between 1998 and 2008, Fannie spent $79.5 million and Freddie spent $94.9 million on lobbying Congress, making them the twentieth and thirteenth biggest spenders, respectively, on lobbying fees during that period.[3] Not all of these expenditures were necessary to contact members of Congress; the GSEs routinely hired lobbyists simply to deprive their opponents of lobbying help. Since lobbyists are frequently part of lawmakers’ networks–and are often former staffers for the same lawmakers–these lobbying expenditures also encouraged members of Congress to support Fannie and Freddie as a means of supplementing the income of their friends.

The failure to adopt meaningful GSE reform in 2005 was a crucial missed opportunity.

In the same vein, Fannie and Freddie hired dozens of Washington’s movers and shakers–at spectacular levels of compensation–to sit on their boards, lobby Congress, and in general help them to manage their political risk. (An early account of this effort was an article entitled “Crony Capitalism: American Style” that appeared in The International Economy in 1999.[4] A later version of the same point was made in Investor’s Business Daily nine years later.[5]) The GSEs also paid for academic research to assure the public that the GSE mission was worthwhile and that the GSEs posed minimal risks to taxpayers. For example, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz coauthored an article in 2002 purporting to show that the risk of GSE default producing taxpayer loss was “effectively zero.”[6]

One of the most successful efforts to influence lawmakers came through community groups. Both Fannie and Freddie made “charitable” or other gifts to community groups, which could then be called upon to contact the GSEs’ opponents in Congress and protest any proposed restrictions on the activities or privileges of the GSEs. GSE supporters in Congress could also count on these groups to back them in their reelection efforts.

But these activities, as important as they were in managing the GSEs’ political risks, paled when compared to the billions of dollars the GSEs made available for spending on projects in the congressional districts and states of their supporters. Many of these projects involved affordable housing. In 1994, Fannie Mae replaced its initial $10 billion program with a $1 trillion affordable housing initiative, and both Fannie and Freddie announced new $2 trillion initiatives in 2001.[7] It is not clear to what extent the investments made in support of these commitments were losers–the GSEs’ profitability over many years could cover a multitude of sins–but it is now certain that the enormous losses associated with the risky housing investments appearing on Fannie and Freddie’s balance sheet today reflect major and imprudent investments in support of affordable housing between 2005 and 2007–investments that ultimately brought about the collapse of Fannie and Freddie.

Even if the earlier affordable housing projects were not losers, however, they represented a new and extra-constitutional way for Congress to dispense funds that should otherwise have flowed through the appropriations process. In one sense, the expenditures were a new form of earmark, but this earmarking evaded the constitutional appropriations process entirely. An illustration is provided by a press release from the office of Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the most ardent supporters of the GSEs in Congress. The headline on the release, dated November 20, 2006–right in the middle of the GSEs’ affordable housing spending spree–was “Schumer Announces up to $100 Million Freddie Mac Commitment to Address Fort Drum and Watertown Housing Crunch.” The subheading continued: “Schumer Unveils New Freddie Mac Plan with HSBC That Includes Low-Interest Low-Downpayment Loans. In June, Schumer Urged Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae Step Up to the Plate and Deliver Concrete Plans–Today Freddie Mac Is Following Through.”[8] If this project had been economically profitable for Fannie or Freddie, Schumer would not have had to “urge” them to “step up.” Instead, using his authority as a powerful member of the Senate Banking Committee–and a supporter of Fannie and Freddie–he appears to have induced Freddie Mac to make a financial commitment that was very much in his political interests but for which the taxpayers of the United States would ultimately be responsible.

Of course, Schumer was only one of many members of Congress who used his political leverage to further his own agenda at taxpayer expense and outside the appropriations process. The list of friends of Fannie and Freddie changed over time; while the GSEs enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the 1990s, over the past decade, they have become increasingly aligned with the Democrats. This shift in the political equilibrium was especially clear in the congressional reaction to the GSEs’ accounting scandals of 2003 and 2004.

The Accounting Scandals

Fannie and Freddie reaped significant benefits from the careful management of their political risk. In June 2003, in the wake of the failures of Enron and WorldCom, Freddie’s board of directors suddenly dismissed its three top officers and announced that the company’s accountants had found serious problems in Freddie’s financial reports. In 2004, after a forensic audit by OFHEO, even more serious accounting manipulation was found at Fannie, and Raines, its chairman, and Timothy Howard, its chief financial officer, were compelled to resign.

It is eloquent testimony to the power of Fannie and Freddie in Congress that even after these extraordinary events there was no significant effort to improve or enhance the powers of their regulator. The House Financial Services Committee developed a bill that was so badly weakened by GSE lobbying that the Bush administration refused to support it. The Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted much stronger legislation in 2005, but unanimous Democratic opposition to the bill in the committee doomed it when it reached the floor. Without any significant Democratic support, debate could not be ended in the Senate, and the bill was never brought up for a vote. This was a crucial missed opportunity. The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (MBS); that measure alone would have prevented the disastrous investment activities of the GSEs in the years that followed. GSE immunity to accounting scandal is especially remarkable when it is recalled that after accounting fraud was found at Enron (and later at WorldCom), Congress adopted the punitive Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposed substantial costs on every public company in the United States. The GSEs’ investment in controlling their political risk–at least among the Democrats–was apparently money well spent.

Nevertheless, the GSEs’ problems were mounting quickly. The accounting scandal, although contained well below the level of the Enron story, gave ammunition to GSE critics inside and outside of Congress. Alan Greenspan, who in his earlier years as Federal Reserve chairman had avoided direct criticism of the GSEs, began to cite the risks associated with their activities in his congressional testimony. In a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee in February 2004, Greenspan noted for the first time that they could have serious adverse consequences for the economy. Referring to the management of interest rate risk–a key risk associated with holding portfolios of mortgages or MBS–he said:

To manage this risk with little capital requires a conceptually sophisticated hedging framework. In essence, the current system depends on the risk managers at Fannie and Freddie to do everything just right, rather than depending on a market-based system supported by the risk assessments and management capabilities of many participants with different views and different strategies for hedging risks.[9]

Then, and again for the first time, Greenspan proposed placing some limit on the size of the GSEs’ portfolios. Greenspan’s initial idea, later followed by more explicit proposals for numerical limits, was to restrict the GSEs’ issuance of debt. Although he did not call for an outright reduction in the size of the portfolios, limiting the issuance of debt amounts to the same thing. If the GSEs could not issue debt beyond a certain amount, they also could not accumulate portfolios. Greenspan noted:

Most of the concerns associated with systemic risks flow from the size of the balance sheets that these GSEs maintain. One way Congress could constrain the size of these balance sheets is to alter the composition of Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage financing by limiting the dollar amount of their debt relative to the dollar amount of mortgages securitized and held by other investors. . . . [T]his approach would continue to expand the depth and liquidity of mortgage markets through mortgage securitization but would remove most of the potential systemic risks associated with these GSEs.[10]

This statement must have caused considerable concern to Fannie and Freddie. Most of their profits came from issuing debt at low rates of interest and holding portfolios of mortgages and MBS with high yields. This was a highly lucrative arrangement; limiting their debt issuance would have had a significant adverse effect on their profitability.

In addition, in January 2005, only a few months after the adverse OFHEO report on Fannie’s accounting manipu-lation, three Federal Reserve economists published a study that cast doubt on whether the GSEs’ activities had any significant effect on mortgage interest rates and concluded further that holding portfolios–a far risker activity than issuing MBS–did not have any greater effect on interest rates than securitization: “We find that both portfolio purchases and MBS issuance have negligible effects on mortgage rate spreads and that purchases are not any more effective than securitization at reducing mortgage interest rate spreads.”[11] Thus, the taxpayer risks cited by Greenspan could not be justified by citing lower mortgage rates, and, worse, there was a strong case for limiting the GSEs to securitization activities alone–a much less profitable activity than holding MBS.

The events in 2003 and 2004 had undermined the legitimacy of the GSEs. They could no longer claim to be competently–or even honestly–managed. An important and respected figure, Alan Greenspan, was raising questions about whether they might be creating excessive risk for taxpayers and systemic risk for the economy as a whole. Greenspan had suggested that their most profitable activity–holding portfolios of mortgages and MBS–was the activity that created the greatest risk, and three Federal Reserve economists had concluded that the GSEs’ activities did not actually reduce mortgage interest rates. It was easy to see at this point that their political risk was rising quickly. The case for continuing their privileged status had been severely weakened. The only element of their activities that had not come under criticism was their affordable housing mission, and it appears that the GSEs determined at this point to play that card as a way of shoring up their political support in Congress.

From the perspective of their 2008 collapse, this may seem to have been unwise, but in the context of the time, it was a shrewd decision. It provided the GSEs with the potential for continuing their growth and delivered enormous short-term profits. Those profits were transferred to stockholders in huge dividend payments over the past three years (Fannie and Freddie paid a combined $4.1 billion in dividends last year alone) and to managers in lucrative salaries and bonuses. Indeed, if it had not been for the Democrats’ desire to adopt a housing relief bill before leaving for the 2008 August recess, no new regulatory regime for the GSEs would have been adopted at all. Only the Senate Republicans’ position–that there would be no housing bill without GSE reform–overcame the opposition of Senators Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), the banking committee chairman, and Schumer.

The GSEs’ confidence in the affordable housing idea was bolstered by what appears to be a tacit understanding. Occasionally, this understanding found direct expression. For example, in his opening statement at a hearing in 2003, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), now the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, referred to an “arrangement” between Congress and the GSEs that tracks rather explicitly what actually happened: “Fannie and Freddie have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable, both in general through leveraging the mortgage market, and in particular, they have a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing.”[12] So here the arrangement is laid out: if the GSEs focus on affordable housing, their position is secure.

Increased Support for Affordable Housing

Affordable housing loans and subprime loans are not synonymous. Affordable housing loans can be traditional prime loans with adequate down payments, fixed rates, and an established and adequate borrower credit history. In trying to increase their commitment to affordable housing, however, the GSEs abandoned these standards. In 1995, HUD, the cabinet-level agency responsible for issuing regulations on the GSEs’ affordable housing obligations, had ruled that the GSEs could get affordable housing credit for purchasing subprime loans. Unfortunately, the agency failed to require that these loans conform to good lending practices, and OFHEO did not have the staff or the authority to monitor their purchases. The assistant HUD secretary at the time, William Apgar, later told the Washington Post that “[i]t was a mistake. In hindsight, I would have done it differently.” Allen Fishbein, his adviser, noted that Fannie and Freddie “chose not to put the brakes on this dangerous lending when they should have.”[13] Far from it. In 1998, Fannie Mae announced a 97 percent loan-to-value mortgage, and, in 2001, it offered a program that involved mortgages with no down payment at all. As a result, in 2004, when Fannie and Freddie began to increase significantly their commitment to affordable housing loans, they found it easy to stimulate production in the private sector by letting it be known in the market that they would gladly accept loans that would otherwise be considered subprime.

Although Fannie and Freddie were building huge exposures to subprime mortgages from 2005 to 2007, they adopted accounting practices that made it difficult to detect the size of those exposures. Even an economist as seemingly sophisticated as Paul Krugman was misled. He wrote in his July 14, 2008, New York Times column that

Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending. . . . In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble. . . . Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t . . . by law. . . . So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.[14]

Here Krugman demonstrates confusion about the law (which did not prohibit subprime lending by the GSEs), misunderstands the regulatory regime under which they operated (which did not have the capacity to control their risk-taking), and mismeasures their actual subprime exposures (which he wrongly states were zero). There is probably more to this than lazy reporting by Krugman; the GSE propaganda machine purposefully misled people into believing that it was keeping risk low and operating under an adequate prudential regulatory regime.

One of the sources of Krugman’s confusion may have been Fannie and Freddie’s strange accounting conventions relating to subprime loans. There are many defi-nitions of a subprime loan, but the definition used by U.S. bank regulators is any loan to a borrower with damaged credit, including such objective criteria as a FICO credit score lower than 660.[15] In their public reports, the GSEs use their own definitions, which purposely and significantly understate their commitment to subprime loans–the mortgages with the most political freight. For example, they disclose the principal amount of loans with FICO scores of less than 620, leaving the reader to guess how many loans fall into the category of subprime because they have FICO scores of less than 660. In these reports, too, Alt-A loans–which include loans with little or no income or other documentation and other deficiencies–are differentiated from subprime loans, again reducing the size of the apparent GSE commitment to the subprime category. These distinctions, however, are not very important from the perspective of realized losses in the subprime and Alt-A categories; loss rates are quite similar for both, even though they are labeled differently. In its June 30, 2008, Investor Summary report, Fannie notes that credit losses on its Alt-A portfolio were 49.6 percent of all the credit losses on its $2.7 trillion single-family loan book of business.[16] Fannie’s disclosures indicate that when all subprime loans (including Alt-A) are aggregated, at least 85 percent of its losses are related to its holdings of both subprime and Alt-A loans. They are all properly characterized as “junk loans.”

Beginning in 2004, after the GSEs’ accounting scandals, the junk loan share of all mortgages in the United States began to rise, going from 8 percent in 2003 to about 18 percent in 2004 and peaking at about 22 percent in the third quarter of 2006. It is likely that this huge increase in commitments to junk lending was largely the result of signals from Fannie and Freddie that they were ready to buy these loans in bulk. For example, in speeches to the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2004, both Raines and Richard Syron–the chairmen, respectively, of Fannie and Freddie–“made no bones about their interest in buying loans made to borrowers formerly considered the province of nonprime and other niche lenders.”[17] Raines is quoted as saying, “We have to push products and opportunities to people who have lesser credit quality.”

There are few data available publicly on the dollar amount of junk loans held by the GSEs in 2004, but according to their own reports, GSE purchases of these mortgages and MBS increased substantially between 2005 and 2007. Subprime and Alt-A purchases during this period were a higher share of total purchases than in previous years. For example, Fannie reported that mortgages and MBS of all types originated in 2005–2007 comprised 49.8 percent of its overall book of single-family mortgages, which includes both mortgages and MBS retained in their portfolio as well as mortgages they securitized and guaranteed. But the percentage of mortgages with subprime characteristics purchased during this period consistently exceeded 49.8 percent, demonstrating that Fannie was substantially increasing its reliance on junk loans between 2005 and 2007. For example, in its 10-Q Investor Summary report for the quarter ended June 30, 2008, Fannie reported that mortgages with subprime characteristics comprised substantial percentages of all 2005–2007 mortgages the company acquired, as shown in table 1. Based on these figures, it is likely that as much as 40 percent of the mortgages that Fannie Mae added to its single-family book of business during 2005–2007 were junk loans.

If we add up all these categories and eliminate double counting, it appears that on June 30, 2008, Fannie held or had guaranteed subprime and Alt-A loans with an unpaid principal balance of $553 billion. In addition, according to the same Fannie report, the company also held $29.5 billion of Alt-A loans and $36.3 billion of subprime loans that it had purchased as private label securities (non-GSE or Ginnie Mae securities).[18] These figures amount to a grand total of $619 billion–approximately 23 percent of Fannie’s book of single-family business on June 30, 2008–and reflect a huge commitment to the purchase of mortgages of questionable quality between 2005 and 2007.

Freddie Mac also published a report on its subprime and Alt-A mortgage exposures as of August 2008. Freddie’s numbers were not as detailed as Fannie’s, but the company reported that 52 percent of its entire single-family credit guarantee portfolio was from book years 2005–2007 (slightly more than Fannie) and that these mortgages had subprime characteristics, as shown in table 2. Based on these figures, it appears that as much as 40 percent of the loans that Freddie Mac added to its book of single-family mortgage business during 2005–2007 also consisted of junk loans.

Freddie’s disclosures did not contain enough detail to eliminate all of the double counting, so it is not possible to estimate the total amount of its subprime loans from the information it reported. Nevertheless, we can calculate the minimum amount of Freddie’s exposure. In the same report, Freddie disclosed that $190 billion of its loans were categorized as Alt-A and $68 billion had FICO credit scores of less than 620, so that they would clearly be categorized as subprime. Based on the limited information Freddie supplied, double counting of $7.6 billion can be eliminated, so that as of August 2008, Freddie held or had guaranteed at least $258 billion of junk loans. To this must be added $134 billion of subprime and Alt-A loans that Freddie purchased from private label issuers,[19] for a grand total of $392 billion–20 percent of Freddie’s single-family portfolio of $1.8 trillion.

A New Trillion-Dollar Commitment

Between 2005 and 2007, Fannie and Freddie acquired so many junk mortgages that, as of August 2008, they held or had guaranteed more than $1.011 trillion in unpaid principal balance exposures on these loans. The losses already recognized on these exposures were responsible for the collapse of Fannie and Freddie and their takeover by the federal government, and there are undoubtedly many more losses to come. In congressional testimony on September 23, James Lockhart, the director of their new regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, cited these loans as the source of the GSEs’ ultimate collapse, as reported in the Washington Post:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchased and guaranteed “many more low-documentation, low-verification and non-standard” mortgages in 2006 and 2007 “than they had in the past.” He said the companies increased their exposure to risks in 2006 and 2007 despite the regulator’s warnings.

Roughly 33 percent of the companies’ business involved buying or guaranteeing these risky mortgages, compared with 14 percent in 2005. Those bad debts on mortgages led to billions of dollars in losses at the firms. “The capacity to raise capital to absorb further losses without Treasury Department support vanished,” Lockhart said.[20]

Although a large share of the subprime loans now causing a crisis in the international financial markets are so-called private label securities–issued by banks and securitizers other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the two GSEs became the biggest buyers of the AAA tranches of these subprime pools in 2005-07.[21] Without their commitment to purchase the AAA tranches of these securitizations, it is unlikely that the pools could have been formed and marketed around the world. Accordingly, not only did the GSEs destroy their own financial condition with their excessive purchases of subprime loans in the three-year period from 2005 to 2007, but they also played a major role in weakening or destroying the solvency and stability of other financial institutions and investors in the United States and abroad.

Why Did They Do It?

Why did the GSEs follow this disastrous course? One explanation–advanced by Lockhart–is that Fannie and Freddie were competing for market share with the private label securitizers and had to purchase substantial amounts of subprime mortgages in order to retain their position in a growing market. Fannie and Freddie’s explanation is that they were the victims of excessively stringent HUD affordable housing goals. Neither of these explanations is plausible. For many years before 2004, Fannie and Freddie had followed relatively prudent investment strategies, even with respect to affordable housing, but they suddenly changed their approach in 2005. Freddie Mac’s report, for example, shows that the percentage of mortgages in its portfolio with subprime characteristics rose rapidly after 2004. Tables 1 and 2 show that for each category of mortgages with subprime characteristics, most of the portfolio of loans with those characteristics was acquired from 2005 to 2007. For example, 83.8 percent of Fannie’s and 90 percent of Freddie’s interest-only loans as of June 2008 were acquired from 2005 to 2007, and 57.5 percent of Fannie’s and 61 percent of Freddie’s loans with FICO scores of less than 620 as of June 2008 were acquired from 2005 to 2007. It seems unlikely that competing for market share or complying with HUD regulations–which contained no enforcement mechanism other than disclosure and delay in approving requests for mission expansions–could be the reason for such an obviously destructive course.

Instead, it seems likely that the event responsible for the GSEs’ change in direction and culture was the accounting scandal that each of them encountered in 2003 and 2004. In both cases, they lost their reputation as well-managed companies and began to encounter questions about their contribution to reducing mortgage rates and their safety and soundness. Serious observers questioned whether they should be allowed to continue to hold mortgages and MBS in their portfolios–by far their most profitable activity–and Senate Republicans moved a bill out of committee that would have prohibited this activity.

Under these circumstances, the need to manage their political risk became paramount, and this required them to prove to their supporters in Congress that they still served a useful purpose. In 2003, as noted above, Frank had cited an arrangement in which the GSEs’ congressional benefits were linked to their investments in affordable housing. In this context, substantially increasing their support for affordable housing–through the purchase of the subprime loans permitted by HUD–seems a logical and even necessary tactic.

Unfortunately, the sad saga of Fannie and Freddie is not over. Some of their supporters in Congress prefer to blame the Fannie and Freddie mess on deregulation or private market failure, perhaps hoping to use such false diagnoses to lay the groundwork for reviving the GSEs for extra constitutional expenditure and political benefit in the future. As the future of the GSEs is debated over the coming months and years, it will be important to remember how and why Fannie and Freddie failed. The primary policy objective should be to prevent a repeat of this disaster by preventing the restoration of the GSE model.

Peter J. Wallison (pwallison@aei.org) is the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at AEI. Charles W. Calomiris (cc374@columbia.edu) is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School.

Messrs. Wallison and Calomiris wish to thank Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae, for his assistance in deciphering the GSEs’ descriptions of their mortgage exposures. AEI research assistant Karen Dubas worked with the authors to produce this Financial Services Outlook.

Click here to view this Outlook as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Notes

1. Quoted in Niles Steven Campbell, “Fannie Mae Officials Try to Assuage Worried Investors,” Real Estate Finance Today, May 10, 1999. See also Binyamin Appelbaum, Carol D. Leonnig, and David S. Hilzenrath, “How Washington Failed to Rein In Fannie, Freddie,” Washington Post, September 14, 2008.

2. Common Cause, “Ask Yourself Why . . . They Didn’t See This Coming,” September 24, 2008, available at www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4542875 (accessed September 29, 2008).

3. Center for Responsive Politics, “Lobbying: Top Spenders,” 2008, available at www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s (accessed September 26, 2008).

4. Owen Ullmann, “Crony Capitalism: American Style,” The International Economy (July/August 1999): 6.

5. Terry Jones, “‘Crony’ Capitalism Is Root Cause of Fannie and Freddie Troubles,” Investor’s Business Daily, September 22, 2008.

6. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jonathan M. Orszag, and Peter R. Orszag, “Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-Based Capital Standard,” Fannie Mae Papers 1, no. 2 (March 2002), available at www.sbgo.com/Papers/fmp-v1i2.pdf (accessed September 29, 2008). Interestingly, Stiglitz today is an outspoken critic of GSE risk-taking. According to Stiglitz, GSE risk-taking was a predictable consequence of the structure of the GSEs and their financial structure and compensation schedules. “We should not be worried about [GSE] shareholders losing their investments. In earlier years, they were amply rewarded. The management remuneration packages that they approved were designed to encourage excessive risk-taking. They got what they asked for. Nor should we be worried about creditors losing their money. Their lack of supervision fuelled the housing bubble and we are now all paying the price.” (Joseph Stiglitz, “Fannie’s and Freddie’s Free Lunch,” Financial Times, July 24, 2008.)

7. Funding Universe, “Fannie Mae–Company History,” available at www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Fannie-Mae-Company-History.html (accessed September 29, 2008); Funding Universe, “Freddie Mac–Company History,” available at www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Freddie-Mac-Company-History.html (accessed September 29, 2008); and Business Wire, “Fannie Mae’s $2 Trillion ‘American Dream Commitment’ on Course with Over $190 Billion in Targeted Lending,” news release, March 14, 2001, avail-able at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_March_14/ai_71707186/ (accessed September 29, 2008).

8. Office of Senator Charles E. Schumer, “Schumer Announces up to $100 Million Freddie Mac Commitment to Address Fort Drum and Watertown Housing Crunch,” news release, November 20, 2006, available at www.senate.gov/~schumer/SchumerWebsite/pressroom/record.cfm?id=266131 (accessed September 29, 2008).

9. Alan Greenspan, “Proposals for Improving the Regulation of the Housing Government Sponsored Enterprises” (testimony, Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, 108th Cong., 1st sess., February 24, 2004), available at www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2004/20040224/ default.htm (accessed September 29, 2008).

10. Ibid.

11. Andreas Lehnert, Wayne Passmore, and Shane M. Sherlund, “GSEs, Mortgage Rates and Secondary Market Activities” (Finance and Economic Discussion Series 2005-07, Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, January 12, 2005), 1, available at www.federalreserve.gov/Pubs/feds/2005/200507/200507pap.pdf (accessed September 29, 2008).

12. Quoted in Gerald Prante, “Barney Frank on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003,” Tax Policy Blog, September 17, 2008, available at www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/23617.html (accessed September 29, 2008).

13. Carol D. Leonnig, “How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed the Crisis,” Washington Post, June 10, 2008.

14. Paul Krugman, “Fannie, Freddie and You,” New York Times, July 14, 2008.
15. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve Board, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Thrift Supervision, “Expanded Guidance for Subprime Lending Programs,” 2001, available at www.federalreserve.gov/Boarddocs/SRletters/2001/sr0104a1.pdf (accessed September 29, 2008).

16. Fannie Mae, “2008 Q2 10-Q Investor Summary,” August 8, 2008, available at www.fanniemae.com/media/pdf/newsreleases/2008_Q2_10Q_Investor_Summary.pdf (accessed September 29, 2008).

17. Neil Morse, “Looking for New Customers,” Mortgage Banking, December 1, 2004.

18. Fannie Mae, “2008 Q2 10-Q Investor Summary,” 20.

19. Freddie Mac, “Freddie Mac Update,” August 2008, 30, available at www.freddiemac.com/investors/pdffiles/investor-presentation.pdf (accessed September 29, 2008).

20. Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Affordable-Housing Goals Scaled Back,” Washington Post, September 24, 2008.

21. James Lockhart, “Reforming the Regulation of the Government Sponsored Enterprises” (testimony, Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, 110th Cong., 2nd sess., February 7, 2008), 6, available at www.ofheo.gov/media/testimony/2708LockharttestimonyWeb.pdf (accessed September 29, 2008).

The economic implosion of our economy due to Fannie and Freddie’s losses continues.  From an AP article published Friday, January 22:

The two companies, which have been run by the government since they almost collapsed in September 2008, have required $111 billion in federal aid to stay afloat. Late last year the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for both companies, lifting an earlier cap of $400 billion.

The “unlimited losses” amounts to an EXPANSION from the $800 BILLION that Congress was going to authorize.  Which is even more than the $787 billion stimulus, which was the largest government outlay in the history of the human race until the black hole of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat it out.

It’s time to learn the truth.

Bush Katrina Economy Obama Haiti Economy

Yesterday on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos substitute host Jake Tapper interviewed Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  Bush could not have been more gracious in praising Obama’s relief efforts.

In other words, he didn’t try to do to Obama what Obama and the Democrats so viciously did to him.

And I couldn’t help but wonder: if Democrats believed their own crap about Bush and Katrina, why on earth would they be asking George Bush to lead an effort for Haitian relief now?

It has now been six days since the earthquake that destroyed Haiti.  Obama promised an unprecedented massive effort to provide emergency relief.

Has it been organized well?

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. relief effort after the Haiti earthquake started too slowly and cautiously, says a retired general who led the military relief effort on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“The next morning after the earthquake, as a military man of 37 years service, I assumed … there would be airplanes delivering aid, not troops, but aid,” said retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who coordinated military operations after disaster struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. “What we saw instead was discussion about, ‘Well we’ve got to send an assessment team in to see what the needs are.’ And anytime I hear that, my head turns red.”

The problem, Honore told USA TODAY, is that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, instead of the military, take the lead in international disaster response.

“I was a little frustrated to hear that USAID was the lead agency,” he said. “I respect them, but they’re not a rapid deployment unit.”

USAID immediately dispatched an assessment team and search-and-rescue teams, but there has still not been widespread distribution of food or water, three days after the Haiti earthquake.

Let’s file that as a ‘no’.

Very little in the way of actual lifesaving supplies had gone out as of the time of that article.  Has that situation improved?

Yesterday, ABC’s Tapper pointed out:

“But it’s five days later, and still a lot of the relief effort, a lot of the aid has not gotten to the people who need it most.”

An exchange between Tapper and Raddatz:

So how about it, Martha? Is the relief effort getting to those who need it most?

RADDATZ: Well, we actually went with a convoy, one truckload of supplies yesterday. We arrived really early in the morning, expecting to track this truck, come back, and go out with another truck. It took us five-and-a-half hours to get these supplies where they were needed.

General Keen, the military commander, said that 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 food rations had been handed out Saturday – four days after the disaster!  70,000 bottles of water for 3.5 MILLION people in need.  They needed 10 million bottles of water a day.

Let’s file that as another big ‘no.’

How many days did Bush get before Democrats hatefully and viciously attacked him?

Well, are they at least providing security for the relief supplies yet to come?

Another exchange during the ABC program between Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz:

TAPPER: Speaking of chaos, Martha, we keep hearing about reports of sporadic violence. Where is the U.S. military in all this? Are they making attempts to secure the island?

RADDATZ: Absolutely not, Jake. They really aren’t. I keep hearing these numbers. There are about 4,200 American military supporting this mission, but mostly they’re out on the ships. They’re on the cutters. You’ve got the 82nd Airborne, not all of the 82nd Airborne, a brigade, about 3,500 soldiers are here. They’re expected to be here sometime next week. The Marines are not yet here, 2,200 Marines.

Jake Tapper pointed out to the US military commander for the region, General Keen, that:

General Keen, I’d like to go to you first. Martha Raddatz just reported that U.S. troops are not out there securing Haiti, even though there are sporadic outbursts of violence, some of them horrific. We heard a report of — in Petionville, a suburb of Port- au-Prince, a policeman handed over a suspected looter to an angry crowd. They stripped him, beat him, and set him on fire. We’ve also heard that some medical personnel are clearing the area because they don’t feel secure.

Sounds like another rather big ‘no’ vote.

I think I’ve amply proven the case that a week after the Haiti disaster a great deal separates what has been done from what could have been done.  I can’t help but remember how bitterly the left attacked Bush for the same failures following an unprecedented natural disaster.

This is what liberals would be saying about Barack Obama if they weren’t hypocrites: Barack Obama hates black people!!!  Barack Obama is creating a genocide of black people!!!

And Republican elected officials, if they were like Democrats, would be claiming accusing the Obama administration of “ethnic cleansing” in Haiti.

Because that’s how loathsome Democrats rolled just a few years back.  And yes, that’s right: the same Democrats who regard any criticism of Barack Obama as a form of blasphemy.

I was pointing that out last year during the Democrat National Convention when Democrats were STILL demonizing and demagoguing Bush for Hurricane Katrina.

The left ignored the fact that Hurricane Katrina was a supermassive disaster that simply overwhelmed the resources of the federal government regardless of who was in charge of it.  They ignored the fact that Bill Clinton hadn’t prepared New Orleans for such a disaster any better than George Bush did.  They ignored the fact that the heavily Democratic city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana had utterly failed to prepare, when such preparation should have been at the very core of their agenda.  They ignored details such as this:

The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn’t do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn’t, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a “mandatory” evacuation a day late, but kept the city’s 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water.

They ignored everything but their ideological agenda and the political axe-to-grind they had in their hands to swing at George Bush with.

And the propagandistic mainstream media helped them do it.

The same media that basically demanded that George Bush push a button and FIX New Orleans have gone out of their way to make excuses for the numerous failures in Haiti under Obama.

What is funny is that it was largely the attacks against Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina that led to the Democrat takeover of the House and the Senate in 2006.

Unemployment was 4.7% when the Democrats took over Congress.  It was 4.7% when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid assumed their respective majority leadership positions.  They have been in control of Congress ever since: and what is unemployment at now?

The Democrat Party/lamestream media narrative is that Bush was responsible for the economic meltdown because it happened during his watch.  There was never once a mention that it happened during Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s watch.  Because that particular narrative doesn’t fit their agenda.

George Bush called for reform of the housing finance market 17 times in 2008 alone — and Democrats ignored him.  They had been blocking his every effort to prevent disaster ever since Bush first tried to do so beginning in 2003.  At that time, Democrat Barney Frank led the effort to block reform, saying:

”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.”

George Bush and John McCain repeatedly warned that if we didn’t address the situation, we would suffer a financial collapse.

John McCain wrote an urgent letter in 2006 that read:

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.

John McCain signed another letter that ended with these words:

With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

Substantial testimony calling for improved regulation of the GSEs has been provided to the Senate by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, HUD, GAO, CBO, and others. Congress has the opportunity to recommit itself to the housing mission of the GSEs while at the same time making sure the GSEs operate in a manner that does not expose our financial system, or taxpayers, to unnecessary risk. It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail. We strongly support an effort to schedule floor time this year to debate GSE regulatory reform.

And they DID fail.  They massively, massively failed.

Only about a month before the whole system crashed, Barney Frank went on the record and said this:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.”

They sure were, you fat, miserable, loathsome, obscene, disgusting, slobbering, lying toad.

The top three headlines under the Google search “Fannie Mae collapse”:

Freddie, Fannie Scam Hidden in Broad Daylight

Financial Markets Reeling from Fannie & Freddie Collapse and Evitable Government Bailout

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Too big not to fail

But as our economy exploded along with the boondoggle housing finance market artificially sustained by Fannie and Freddie, the Democrats demagogued the Republicans.  And the lamestream media duly reported it as though it were all the liberal’s-god-socialist-big-government’s truth.

And thus you see how the liberal demagoguery surrounding Hurricane Katrina led to the liberal demagoguery surrounding the economic collapse.

And it just never stops.

The Obama White House has been rather shamelessly politicizing the Haitian earthquake disaster to bolster up its low support.

And even when Obama abandons Haiti to go to Massachusetts to prop up Democrat Martha Coakley’s failing candidacy, Democrats manage to demagogue over Haiti.

Bill Clinton, the Obama-appointed special envoy for Haiti, didn’t bother to go there, but focused on what was far more important: Martha Coakely’s election bid in Massachusetts.

Someone asked Bill Clinton about that, and he said that relief for Haiti and the election of Martha Coalkey in Massachusetts were “just two sides of the same coin.” The blatant and breathtaking politicization is mindboggling!!!

What would the mainstream media be saying about Republican George Bush literally turning his back on a disaster to fly north to Massachusetts to campaign for a Republican – bringing us special envoy to Haiti to do so with him – rather than turn south to deal with the Haiti disaster?  What would these demagogues who deceitfully call themselves “journalists” have said?

Even if you’re a liberal, you’re not stupid enough to realize that the media would have unleashed hell on earth to attack George Bush for such a partisan political act of abandonment.

And that’s what I’m really getting at.  The double standard between treatment of Democrats and Republicans is so massive it is positively unreal.  Obama can screw up every which way and the media will let it pass; Bush could hit a homerun and the media would declare it a foul ball and then attack him for his incredibly poor swing.

Meanwhile, of course, millions of Haitians are suffering, and not getting helped.

Just as millions of Americans are suffering, and not getting helped.

Meanwhile, the news media largely continues to spin the economy positively, even as more jobs were lost under Obama in 2009 than for any president in any year since 194o.

Update January 29:

HUMAN TRAFFICKING, FOOD RIOTS AND LACK OF MEDICINE PLAGUE HAITI
John G. Winder , The Cypress Times
Published 01/29/2010 – 10:28 a.m. CST

Mass graves. Tent cities.More than 90% of the nation’s structures damaged or destroyed. No food.Amputees and orphans left to fend for themselves.  Nearly all of the businesses gone.  No employment.  Yet it still gets worse for the people of Haiti.

Haiti’s Prime Ministery, Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN that he is receiving reports of children being stolen and trafficked as slaves, sex slaves and for the purpose of having their organs harvested to be sold.

“There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs,” Bellerive said.

UNICEF is also reporting that children are being taken from hospitals by traffickers.

Had this happened under George Bush, with these results, the lamestream media would be attacking Bush as the most evil man since Hitler and the most incompetent buffoon since God created incompetent buffoons.

Just pointing out the obvious truth.