Liberals Attacked ‘Angry Black Women’ Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin And Michelle Bachmann Long Before Right Teed Off On Michelle Obama

“I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here and a strong woman. But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced. That I’m some angry black woman.”

Asked how she deals with that image, Mrs. Obama said “I just try to be me.” — Michelle Obama

Hey, Michelle, as you trot out the race card to demonize your critics, I’d just like to suggest the very real possibility that your problem is that you ARE an “angry black woman.”

You know, the kind of lifelong angry, bitter woman who would say something like this:

“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country,” she told a Milwaukee crowd today, “because it feels like hope is making a comeback.”

And, of course, this story is about the debilitating friction between this “angry black woman” – who the last time I checked had NOT been elected as president yet – and the professional staff that were doing a pretty piss poor job even BEFORE Michelle in her role of a lifetime as “Lady Macbeth” started interfering with them and undermining them.

Michelle Obama was privately fuming, not only at the president’s team, but also at her husband.

In the days after the Democrats lost Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010, Barack Obama was even-keeled as usual in meetings, refusing to dwell on the failure or lash out at his staff. The first lady, however, could not fathom how the White House had allowed the crucial seat, needed to help pass the president’s health care legislation and the rest of his agenda, to slip away, several current and former aides said.

To her, the loss was more evidence of what she had been saying for a long time: Mr. Obama’s advisers were too insular and not strategic enough. She cherished the idea of her husband as a transformational figure, but thanks in part to the health care deals the administration had cut, many voters were beginning to view him as an ordinary politician.

The first lady never confronted the advisers directly — that was not her way — but they found out about her displeasure from the president. “She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” Mr. Obama confided, according to aides.

Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff, repeated the first lady’s criticisms to colleagues with indignation, according to three of them. Mr. Emanuel, in a brief interview, denied that he had grown frustrated with Mrs. Obama, but other advisers described a grim situation: a president whose agenda had hit the rocks, a first lady who disapproved of the turn the White House had taken, and a chief of staff who chafed against her influence. […]

But that spring, Mrs. Obama made it clear that she thought her husband needed a new team, according to her aides. When the president decided to deliver a lofty speech about overhauling immigration laws in June 2010, even though there was no legislation on the table and the effort could hurt vulnerable Democrats, Mr. Emanuel objected. Aides did not produce the speech he wanted and the president stayed up much of the night rewriting — but the address drew a flat reception. Mr. Obama was irritated, two advisers said, and told Ms. Jarrett to keep an eye on other top staff members to make sure that they delivered what he wanted.
 
Several West Wing aides said they had heard secondhand that Mrs. Obama was angry about the incident. Later, they said they wondered: was the president using his wife to convey what he felt?…
 
But at Mr. Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. staff meeting the next day, Ms. Jarrett announced that the first lady had concerns about the White House’s response to the book, according to several people present. All eyes turned to Mr. Gibbs, who started to steam.
 
“Don’t go there, Robert, don’t do it,” Mr. Emanuel warned.
 
“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” Mr. Gibbs yelled, adding expletives. He interrogated Ms. Jarrett, whose calm only seemed to frustrate him more. The two went back and forth, Ms. Jarrett unruffled, Mr. Gibbs shaking with rage. Finally, several staff members said, Mr. Gibbs cursed the first lady — colleagues stared down at the table, shocked — and stormed out.

This is, to my knowledge, the first administration with THREE chiefs of staff.  So far.  And all of them being appointed in a single term.  And there is clearly a very angry black woman behind some of that mess, isn’t there?  Maybe we should rename the position “Chump of Staff” after you get through shredding them.

So let’s say we don’t call you an “angry black woman” – and I don’t think anyone of note did until you started calling yourself that to score pity points with your “race card well-played” demagoguery.  Let’s say instead we call you a “privately fuming black woman.”

But while we’re on the subject of “angry black women,” let’s recount a few other angry black women who got a face full of hell from the hypocrite elite media establishment; women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.  And of course women like Margaret Thatcher.

The LA Times pointed out the fact that liberals are STILL not done hating on fellow angry black woman club member Margaret Thatcher even as all this “angry black woman” crap was waxing so eloquently in the media talking points:

Reporting from London — The face peering from the ads and posters belongs to Meryl Streep, but the shadow that hovers over the land is definitely Margaret Thatcher’s.

The reaction to the film “The Iron Lady” has illuminated just how polarizing “Mrs. T.” (or “TBW” — “that bloody woman”) remains a generation after her ouster from 10 Downing St.

Love her or hate her — and there are plenty of people on both sides — it seems that hardly anyone here can watch the movie without their personal feelings entering into it.

Put Sam Fogg in the “hate” camp.

“It’s not possible for anyone who’s lived in the Thatcher era to see it objectively,” the 57-year-old art dealer said after a recent screening in London. “I didn’t like it — it was a hagiography…. It didn’t show a lot of her economic and social policies that turned the country into the selfish modern England we live in now.”

The film, which features Streep as Thatcher in a bravura performance as Britain’s only female prime minister, is stirring up extra passion because it offers the British a look at their past just as they appear to be repeating it.

After a long hiatus, Britain is once again being ruled by Thatcher’s Conservative Party, led by politicians who grew up under her 1979-90 premiership and who consider themselves heirs to her small-government, free-enterprise ideology. In a drive to slash public spending, officials have embarked on a series of stinging budget cuts as deep as any she ever ordered.

The unemployment rate, which soared during her first years as prime minister, is now at its highest since 1994. Like Thatcher, Prime Minister David Cameron is sparring with Britain’s unions and with Europe, the Tories’ perennial boogeyman. And for good measure, riots erupted across England in August, just as race riots shook Britain not long after Thatcher came to power.

The sense of political deja vu has only sharpened the fault lines that Thatcher opened and that still run through British society.

To her admirers, she will always be the forceful leader who, blue eyes flashing and handbag swinging, dragged Britain out of its socialist torpor and restored the country’s swagger. Like Republicans who eagerly wrap themselves in the mantle of her contemporary and political soul mate, Ronald Reagan, many Conservatives here still invoke her name and zealously defend her reputation and legacy as arguably Britain’s most dominant prime minister of the 20th century after Winston Churchill.

Cue the loud sniping at “The Iron Lady’s” portrayal of Thatcher as a frail octogenarian suffering from dementia, even though Thatcher is a frail octogenarian suffering from dementia.

One of her former Cabinet ministers denounced it as “ghoulish”; another declared that she was never the “half-hysterical, over-emotional” woman shown in the movie.

“It’s a fantastic piece of acting by Meryl Streep, but you can’t help wondering, why do we have to have this film right now?” Cameron complained to the BBC. “It is a film much more about aging and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister.”

 

Cameron, who was 12 when Thatcher assumed the office he holds now, has steered away from describing himself as an out-and-out Thatcherite, preferring to cast himself as a new-model Tory.

“The Conservatives have a more, if you like, human face in David Cameron,” said Jon Tonge, a political scientist at the University of Liverpool. “But I wouldn’t say the policies are that different from Margaret Thatcher’s.”

On the other side, many of Thatcher’s detractors still regard her as a monster who promoted heedless individualism and who once famously declared there was “no such thing as society,” a creed they believe the current government is gleefully pursuing.

For them, the Thatcher years are a wound that not only never healed but has gotten worse. They too dislike the film’s portrait of Thatcher as a doddering old woman who has imaginary conversations with her dead husband, not because they prefer to see her in her prime but because it humanizes a woman they still consider the devil.

“You only have to say her name, and people express the most vehement opinions,” the film’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, told the Guardian newspaper. “I’ve met friends who have said, ‘I’m going to be very torn about [your movie], because I made a pact with a friend at university that we would party on the day of her death.'”

Internet forums, left-wing journals and radio call-in shows seethe with still-undimmed rage from Thatcher loathers who seem unable, or unwilling, to separate Lloyd’s work of cinematic art from its subject.

“How can anyone make a star out of this evil woman?” one listener emailed a radio call-in show. “If you look at England today, you can trace most of our problems back to her.”

Here’s how the left – in this case a very dishonest Rolling Stone Magazine – recently depicted Michelle Bachmann:

Hey Michelle, how about if you wait until a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity depicts you as a crazed Lady Macbeth waving a bloody sword and your copy of Das Kapital around before you get your panties in a bunch over what very much appears to be a basically TRUE characterization of you?

You take a look at what the mainstream media and the Democrat Party did to conservative women and you seriously need to do a whole lot less talking and a whole lot more shutting the hell up.

Nothing screams “angry black woman” more loudly than playing the race card the moment you get confronted with some rather nasty facts about your disposition and the polarizing climate it is creating, fwiw.

Obama Turns To Clinton To Advance The ‘Democrats As Party Success’ Myth As His Economy Turns to Crap

Barack Obama is widely seen as a complete failure.  Businesses large and small are turning on him and his incredibly harmful economic policies.  Even former staunch allies such as US News & World Report owner Mortimer Zuckerman and GE CEO Jeff Immelt have turned on him.

His answer?  To turn to an impeached, disbarred, lying and oath-breaking, sexual predator and unconvicted rapist to save a failed president for the sake of the Democrat Party.

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama sought on Wednesday to lift sagging confidence in his economic stewardship by enlisting the help of predecessor Bill Clinton, as a leading business group issued a scathing critique of the administration’s policies.

Clinton, who presided over the 1990s economic boom, joined Obama at a closed-door White House meeting with business leaders to encourage job creation and investment, including in clean energy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a top business group, issued a rebuke of Obama’s economic agenda, accusing him and his Democrats in Congress of neglecting job creation and hampering growth with burdensome regulatory and tax policies.

What this country needs is a return to “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

It doesn’t matter that Clinton once recognized that Obama is little more than a Chicago thug.

It doesn’t matter in this Obama-era of race-baiting that Obama played the race card on Clinton.

It doesn’t matter that Bill Clinton subsequently demonstrated that he frankly deserved to be labeled as a racist when he outraged Ted Kennedy by telling him regarding Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”  Or that Clinton essentially said, “MAYBE joining the Ku Klux Klan was wrong” in honoring the former Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd.

All that matters in the mainstream media propagandist cesspool is that – while Barack Obama is increasingly recognized to be a complete economic failure and fraud – Bill Clinton is an economic hero who can therefore temporarily restore confidence in Obama and his failed policies until after the November election.

As usual, the media isn’t telling the full truth about Clinton.  Or what happened to create the healthy economy of the 1990s.

The mainstream media is remarkably consistent: you can count upon them to never give Democrats the blame they deserve, and you can count upon them to never give Republicans the credit they deserve, about anything.

Bill Clinton is widely hailed for presiding over a great economy that featured a budget surplus.

But let’s consider a very basic fact:

From the Herald-Journal, January 27, 1984”

If you took a quiz on government and were asked who writes the national budget, would you answer “The President” or “The Congress”?

The correct answer is “The Congress.”

The U.S. Constitution says that power belongs to Congress. All through our history, the Congress has exercised that power. The president cannot spend one thin dime that has not been approved by Congress.

Article One of the Constitution of the United States refutes the argument that Bill Clinton should receive credit for his “surplus”.  It was the Republican-dominated CONGRESS featuring promises that stemmed from the Contract with America, that resulted in the healthy budget that Clinton the media gave Clinton credit for producing.  Even though all he did was sign (often after vetoes) that which Republicans had actually produced.

What we don’t get told very was that Bill Clinton did such a miserable job running the country for his first two years in office that he suffered the largest (at least until this coming November) political defeat in American history when the Republicans swept into power over both the House and the Senate.  We’re not told that Republicans continued to be the majority party in both the House and Senate during the years that the media assigned Clinton all the credit.

It was those Republicans who were most responsible for the good times that resulted.  They are most certainly responsible for the budget surpluses that Democrats have congratulated themselves for ever since.  The very first item on the Republicans’ agenda was the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

One quick example of these Republican changes was welfare reform.  In his 1996 State of the Union, after losing even more fights, Bill Clinton was famously forced to admit, “The era of big government is over.”  And Republicans were making that statement true by passing welfare reform legislation and an avalanche of other cost-cutting measures that made a budget surplus possible.

Two welfare reform bills were passed by the Republican Congress, which Clinton vetoed.  Then a third bill was passed by the Republicans, which Clinton finally signed.  The National Organization for Women noted:

“There is little difference between the welfare bill (H.R.4) which the president vetoed in January and the new plan H.R. 3734/S 1795.”

An analysis by Steven Dawson for the Saint Louis University Law Journal observed that:

“In fact, President Clinton vetoed two largely similar prior versions of the bill.”

All rhetoric aside, Bill Clinton was FORCED to sign welfare reform into law by the Republican Congress.  Just as he was FORCED into a balanced budget, and any subsequent budget surplus.

But after being literally dragged into signing it, Bill Clinton took credit for it as though it had been his idea all along.  And the media duly reported that slanted history as a matter of “fact.”

That said, we can also point out that “the Clinton budget surplus” also had a lot to do with budgetary smoke and mirrors.

And like I said, the same media that will never give Republicans credit for something good will never give Democrats blame for something bad.

Consider the last three plus years’ worth of reckless spending.  The Bush administration has been blamed for much of this reckless spending, but it was actually a Democrat Congress that swept into power in 2006 (largely due to what we can now readily see was hypocritical demagoguery over the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina rather than any economic issue) which proceeded to spend America into the stratosphere:

For the record, the last budget from a Republican President AND a Republican Congress – FY-2007 (passed in 2006) – resulted in a$161 billion deficit at a time when unemployment was 4.6%.  That’s what happened the last time the GOP was in control.

What happened when the Democrats took control in January 2007?  Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi passed a FY-2008 budget that had a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times the deficit in the immediately previous Republican-passed budget.  Three times.  And this before the financial crisis that somehow “necessitated” all this massive spending.

Now, that’s a pretty crazy increase under Democrat control.  But you aint seen nothin’ yet.

The Democrats passed a FY-2009 budget with a staggering, mind-boggling, totally reckless $1.42 TRILLION deficit.

The FY-2010 budget approved by Reid and Pelosi and signed by Obama had an estimated $1.6 TRILLION deficit.

The deficit has increased from $161 billion in the last budget before Democrats took control of the Congress (FY 2007) to $1.42 trillion in the most recent fiscal year (FY 2009)—an increase of $1.26 trillion or 782%.

With three months remaining in the fiscal 2009 budget, the federal deficit just officially passed the $1 trillion mark.  Worse yet, Obama borrowed more than forty cents for every single dollar he spent.

We also suffered a budget shortfall of $94 billion in the month of June, which marks the first June in more than ten years (read, “encompassing the entire Bush presidency”).  Bush’s success in raising revenues is bookended by two Democrat presidents who failed.

And now the Democrats aren’t even bothering to pass a budget for the next fiscal year, so they can simply spend without any accountability whatsoever.

The old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats:

In the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, the average deficit was $104 billion (average of final deficit/surplus FY1996-FY2007 data taken from Table F-1 below).  In just 3 years under Democrats, the average deficit is now almost $1.1 trillion (average of final deficit/surplus FY2008 and 2009 data taken from Table F-1; FY2010 data taken from Table 1-3).  Source: CBO January 2010 Budget and Economic Outlook

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Minority Whip) rightly pointed out on ABC’s “This Week”:

“If you look at the kind of deficit that we’ve incurred over the last three years that the Democrats have been in control of Congress, 60% of the overall deficit from the last ten years has occurred in that period. And frankly with the incurrence of the debt, we’ve seen very little result. That’s why we think we ought to choose another way.”

And yet the media falsely blame BUSH and Republicans for that spending, rather than Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, even though factually speaking the Democrats were ENTIRELY to blame for every single penny that was spent from January 2007 on.  Because our Constitution forbids a president from spending; it is CONGRESS that spends.

I also point out in that article (and many others such as this one) that Democrats were primarily responsible for the disastrous policies that led to the 2008 collapse.  They were basically completely responsible for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their reckless policies, and then utterly refused to allow any reforms that would have averted the ensuing disaster.

In an honest world, Bill Clinton wouldn’t get anywhere near as much credit as he does for the strong economy of the 1990s.  And Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near as much blame as they received for the 2008 collapse.

The problem is, our mainstream media advances one outright lie after another.  And the lies become “truth” through sheer repetition.

Obama isn’t calling upon Bill Clinton to actually offer advice on how to turn the economy around; he’s calling Clinton in as a prop.  Bill Clinton was forced to change his failed policies when the Republicans swept into power.  Hopefully, that is exactly what will happen beginning this November.

The Comprehensive Case Against Barack Obama from Hotair.com

I have found Ed Morissey to be an incredible analyst of American political culture with an amazing access to the most relevant stories and information.  Here, he is joined by journalists Guy Benson and Mary Katherine Ham in a presentation of many of the issues that Americans should know about and soberly consider.  Barack Obama’s radical stand on abortion; his hypocritical positions and contradictory positions on taxes; his long list of radical associations; his demonstrated poor foreign policy judgment; his open disdain for the American heartland; his reliance upon dealing the race card for political benefit; and his lack of any meaningful legislative accomplishment, are all treated.

The article is fairly long, with quite a few videos, so I shall link to it.  But please read!

The comprehensive argument against Barack Obama

How ‘Failed Policies’ Of Democrats Were Responsible For Financial Crisis

Why should anyone blame Democrats for the housing finance crisis?  Because they laid virtually all the landmines that would eventually explode in the first place, and then they wouldn’t allow Republicans to reform or even regulate the impending disaster before it occurred, that’s why.

From the New York Times in 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. . . .

”Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. ”Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.” . . .

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 LA Times writes on May 31, 1999 that:

It’s one of the hidden success stories of the Clinton era. In the great housing boom of the 1990s, black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded. The number of African Americans owning their own home is now increasing nearly three times as fast as the number of whites; the number of Latino homeowners is growing nearly five times as fast as that of whites….

Under Clinton, bank regulators have breathed the first real life into enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, a 20-year-old statute meant to combat “redlining” by requiring banks to serve their low-income communities. The administration also has sent a clear message by stiffening enforcement of the fair housing and fair lending laws. The bottom line: Between 1993 and 1997, home loans grew by 72% to blacks and by 45% to Latinos, far faster than the total growth rate.

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. . . . .

Another article in the New York TImes from September 11, 2003:

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

This reform – and another in 2005/06 – were blocked by Democrats who threatened to filibuster the bill in the Senate.

In that 2003 New York Times article, we find the extent of Republicans’ concerns, and of Democrats’ intransigence:

Fannie Mae, which was previously known as the Federal National Mortgage Association, and Freddie Mac, which was the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, have been criticized by rivals for exerting too much influence over their regulators.

”The regulator has not only been outmanned, it has been outlobbied,” said Representative Richard H. Baker, the Louisiana Republican who has proposed legislation similar to the administration proposal and who leads a subcommittee that oversees the companies. ”Being underfunded does not explain how a glowing report of Freddie’s operations was released only hours before the managerial upheaval that followed. This is not world-class regulatory work.”

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

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

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

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

Democrats such as Watt and Maxine Waters played the race card to label any effort to prevent poor and black families from buying homes they couldn’t afford as racist.

But when the fecal matter hit the rotary oscillator as a direct result of Democrats’ policies, Nancy Pelosi trots and says:

“The — what we have now is a manmade disaster, a disaster that sprang — comes from the Bush failed policies, the failure of the Bush administrations to steward our economy in a responsible way.”

I am telling you, if you vote for Democrats in November, you will be putting the very people who caused this disaster in power, and you will be entrusting the people who created a crisis in charge of averting the very crisis they caused.  By putting these irresponsible demagogues in charge of our economy during one of the most vulnerable periods in our nations’ history, you will in effect be saying, “I want the Great Depression.  I want my children to suffer.”

Financial Crisis: Obama Democrats Have Red Ink All Over Them

Whether Franklin Raines is an Obama adviser or not is a rather entertaining question.  He sure seemed to be one until not very long ago:

Raines was an Obama adviser on July 16, when The Washington Post reported:

“In the four years since he stepped down as Fannie Mae’s chief executive under the shadow of a $6.3 billion accounting scandal, Franklin D. Raines has been quietly constructing a new life for himself. He has shaved eight points off his golf handicap, taken a corner office in Steve Case’s D.C. conglomeration of finance, entertainment and health-care companies and more recently, taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.”

And Raines was still an Obama adviser on August 28, when The Washington Post said:

In the current crisis, their biggest backers have been Democrats such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.). Two members of Mr. Obama’s political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae.

In fact, Raines was still an Obama adviser as of September 18, when a Baltimore Sun blogger cited a Wikipedia article as follows:

“Franklin Delano Raines (born January 14, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae who served as White House budget director under President Bill Clinton. He is currently employed by Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign as an economic adviser.”

But that last sentence has been scrubbed from Wikipedia within the last two days, and all of a sudden Franklin Raines somehow isn’t an Obama adviser anymore.  It’s almost like when Barack Obama said of Jeremiah Wright, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me…”, until, you know, he denounced him.

But when Barack Obama denounces something, all mention of it as being in any way associated with him somehow gets purged – even if that relationship lasted 23 years.  Now when it comes to the McCain denunciation of Franklin Raines as an Obama adviser, The Washington Post faults McCain for relying on…the Washington Post.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers noted that Obama didn’t contradict the claim when it first appeared in the Post (MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO!!!).  But that doesn’t seem to matter.  What matters is that Franklin Raines is black, and therefore McCain is a racist for connecting Obama and Raines.  Apparently, the card deck of Barack Obama, “new politician” of “hope” and “change,” contains a whole bunch of race cards.

But, try as he might to distance himself from his erstwhile adviser, what Barack Obama CAN’T do is deny that Franklin Raines is a DEMOCRAT.  A Democrat who dredges up all sorts of bad mojo for Democrats as they try to frantically scrub their hands of all the red ink and all the corruption that took place during Franklin Raines’ tenure at Fannie Mae.

It reminds us of the October 7, 2004 Los Angeles Times story that appeared titled, “Ex-Fannie Mae Accountant Says CEO Knew of Concerns“:

The former Fannie Mae accountant who raised questions about the mortgage giant’s bookkeeping said Wednesday that he took his concerns directly to Chief Executive Franklin Raines in 2002 and asked him to investigate.

The disclosure by Roger Barnes, who left Fannie Mae in October 2003, came as Raines and Chief Financial Officer Timothy Howard defended the company’s accounting and told Congress that regulators’ allegations of earnings manipulation represented an interpretation of complex rules.

At a House subcommittee hearing, Raines and Howard testified under oath in their first public appearance since news surfaced Sept. 22 about the allegations and a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into government-sponsored Fannie Mae. Lawmakers questioned them closely about an instance in 1998 in which accounting rules were said to have been deliberately violated so that top executives could collect full bonuses.

“This is a very serious allegation, and I deny that it occurred,” Raines testified.

The thing is, it DID occur, and much worse.  And it was discovered that Raines had manipulated accounting practices so that senior executives could make millions in bonuses:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Employees at mortgage giant Fannie Mae manipulated accounting so that executives could collect millions in bonuses as senior management deceived investors and stonewalled regulators at a company whose prestigious image was phony, a federal agency charged Tuesday.

The blistering report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the product of an extensive three-year investigation, was issued as the government-sponsored company struggles to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal.

Earlier, a person familiar with the situation said that Fannie Mae was being fined between $300 million and $500 million for the alleged manipulation of accounting to facilitate executives’ bonuses, in a settlement with the housing oversight agency.

“The image of Fannie Mae as one of the lowest-risk and ‘best in class’ institutions was a facade,” James B. Lockhart, the acting director of OFHEO, said in a statement as the report was released. “Our examination found an environment where the ends justified the means. Senior management manipulated accounting, reaped maximum, undeserved bonuses, and prevented the rest of the world from knowing.”

The report also faulted Fannie Mae’s board of directors for failing to exercise its oversight responsibilities and failing to discover “a wide variety of unsafe and unsound practices” at the largest buyer and guarantor of home mortgages in the country.

The OFHEO review, involving nearly 8 million pages of documents, details what the agency calls an arrogant and unethical corporate culture. From 1998 to mid-2004, the smooth growth in profits and precisely-hit earnings targets each quarter reported by Fannie Mae were “illusions” deliberately created by senior management using faulty accounting, the report says.

The accounting manipulation tied to executives’ bonuses occurred from 1998 to 2004, according to the report, a much longer period than was previously known.

Lest any not know it, Franklin Raines was a Clinton appointee.

A Wikipedia article (we’ll see how soon it takes to purge it!) talking about the Clinton years is extremely informative in the current ruinous aftermath:

The Clinton Administration’s regulatory revisions [1] with an effective starting date of January 31, 1995 were credited with substantially increasing the number and aggregate amount of loans to small businesses and to low- and moderate-income borrowers for home loans. Part of the increase in home loans was due to increased efficiency and the genesis of lenders, like Countrywide, that do not mitigate loan risk with savings deposits as do traditional banks using the new subprime authorization. This is known as the secondary market for mortgage loans. The revisions allowed the securitization of CRA loans containing subprime mortgages. The first public securitization of CRA loans started in 1997 by Bear Stearns. [2] The number of CRA mortgage loans increased by 39 percent between 1993 and 1998, while other loans increased by only 17 percent. [3] [4]

Bill Clinton walks off the stage as the conquering hero in the mythical narrative of the liberal media, but IT WAS THESE VERY LOANS BY THESE VERY LENDERS THAT RESULTED IN THE DISASTER WE ARE NOW SUFFERING.

President Bush tried to reform Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the entire housing finance industry before it was too late:

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae

By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: September 11, 2003

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.

But his effort to reform the housing finance industry by reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was blocked – BY DEMOCRATS.

The same New York Times article cited above, dated September 11, 2003 (yet another 9/11 that Democrats caused, and Republicans took the blame for ) ends with these words:

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

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

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

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

Barney Frank – the same liberal doofus who said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were fine and not facing any kind of financial crisis – is still around, and still in charge of the Financial Services Committee.

Mel Watts, the race-card playing liberal who opposed reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the grounds that it would prevent poor blacks from getting home loans, is also still around.

And though Barack Obama may be able to distance himself from Franklin Raines – however falsely – he can’t distance himself from another prominent “adviser” – Jim Johnson.  Johnson was briefly appointed to head Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until it was discovered that he had benefited from sweetheart Countrywide loans.  And Johnson was another Fannie Mae CEO who was Franklin Raines’ predecessor at Fannie Mae.  He joins a long list of Clinton Democrats who “served” at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and walked away with millions.  Jim Johnson also sits on the board at Goldman Sachs, a company that was also massively invested in subprime loans but managed to sell them short and preserve itself.

And Obama is personally up to his eyeballs in the housing finance collapse in other ways, as well.  Obama is second on the list of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign money recipients only after fellow Democrat Chris Dodd; and he is second on the list of Lehman Bros’ campaign money recipients only after fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.  Is it any wonder he would appoint Penny Pritzker – who was at the very epicenter of what would come to be the biggest financial scandal in American history, and who paid a $460 million fine to bribe her way out of jail – as his national campaign finance chair.  He also named Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential nominee, in spite of the fact that Biden championed the very bill that many experts and at least two studies attribute to creating the mess that caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their homes and precipitated much of the ensuing financial market meltdown.

Now allow me to provide the contrast between Obama – who is tied by both party and by big money contributions to his political career – with John McCain.  The previously quoted Washington Post says:

This is not an easy one for the Illinois senator because of the companies’ close ties to his party. To be sure, both Republican and Democratic politicos have held well-paid positions in the two firms or have partaken of the tens of millions that they spend on lobbying. But a few Republicans, such as Mr. McCain and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), who has been chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, have taken them on over the years, warning about their use of an implicit government guarantee to pursue private profits. Meanwhile, Democrats were not only politically but intellectually committed to the companies, seeing them as innovative public-private institutions that have been a boon to home ownership. In the current crisis, their biggest backers have been Democrats such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.). Two members of Mr. Obama’s political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae.

John McCain fought hard to pass regulations that would control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in May 25, 2006.  But again the measure was killed by Democratic opposition.  Hot Air takes up McCain’s efforts and who killed them:

In this speech, McCain managed to predict the entire collapse that has forced the government to eat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Bear Stearns and AIG.  He hammers the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, both of whom have worked as advisers to Barack Obama this year.  McCain also noted the power of their lobbying efforts to forestall oversight over their business practices.  He finishes with the warning that proved all too prescient over the past few days and weeks.

John McCain fought in vain to prevent the collapse of the housing finance market, and would have succeeded had it not been for utterly determined Democratic opposition.  Barack Obama, for his part, led the lists of campaign contribution recipients from both Fannie and Freddie and from disgraced and belly-up Lehman Bros.

There are only 43 days left in this election.  That is not very long for the American people to realize that they are being lied to by the very people and the very party that caused the disaster that has so angered the electorate.

Newsweek Claims That Whites Who Don’t Vote For Obama Are Racists

Newsweek isn’t a completely in-the-tank-for liberals biased bullpoop rag.  They represent “legitimate journalism.”  Well, that’s the claim, anyway.

Of course, what passes for “legitimate journalism” often looks like the piece that recently emerged from the tiny little ideologue brain of Jacob Weisberg.

Here’s a representative sample:

But let’s be honest: the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He lags with them for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

Just realize something: if you are white and you don’t vote for Barack Obama, it is for one and only one reason: you are a racist.

I would love to vote for a black President.  I would be quite happy to vote for a woman.  The only thing I ask is that they share my basic values, beliefs, and vision for this country.

I know, I know.  How racist and sexist of me.

Here’s the Newsweek article, in its entirety, with a little more of my outrage to follow:

Barack Obama, The Race-Card-Dealing Radical

Barack Obama had the following to say on July 31st:

“Since they don’t have any new ideas the only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me. They’re going to try to say that I’m a risky guy, they’re going to try to say, ‘Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills and, and they’re going to send out nasty emails.”

But let’s break that down.

“Since they don’t have any new ideas…” Well, stop and think about it: the demand by McCain and Republicans to drill for oil offshore is itself a VERY new idea, given that it hasn’t been contemplated by Democrats for decades. It’s Barack Obama’s psycho-environmentalist “let’s all inflate our tires instead” mantra that is the same old boring liberal nonsense.

“They’re going to say that I’m a risky guy.” You’re darn right that we’re saying he’s a risky guy:

He’s THE most liberal member of the entire United States Senate. If that fact alone doesn’t add up to “risky,” I don’t know what does.

His worldview is radical and Marxist, coming out of Jim Cone’s and Jeremiah Wright’s “black liberation theology” and the most radical church in the entire country.

His “economic justice” platform comes right out of Jeremiah Wright’s clearly Marxist economics. It is nothing more than a code word for massive social redistributionism.

He’s got so many radical, leftist, and even terrorist associations beginning in his youth (e.g., Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky) and continuing unabated to the present that it’s frankly frightening. His longstanding official association with the radical group ACORN is also beyond troubling.

“They’re going to try to say, ‘Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills…”

It’s amazing that the man’s very name is somehow supposed to be off-limits. Regardless of what Barack Hussein Obama may think of himself, his name is NOT the sacred divine name which dare not be uttered. If this man is so arrogant and so hyper-sensitive that he can’t stand people saying his name, then he has no business in politics or anywhere else where he could come into contact with people.

It’s that “he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills” comment that gets to the radical heart of Barack HUSSEIN Obama. He is spouting the same racist garbage that his “spiritual mentor” for 23 years spouted. I’ve seen the “he’s not playing the race card” posts, and they have to engage in all kinds of semantics to avoid the clear meaning of the sentence. Ask yourself, “Why doesn’t Obama look like all the presidents?” The clear answer is, “Because he’s black.” It’s not because Obama doesn’t wear a funny wig (Washington) or because Obama doesn’t wear a funny beard (Lincoln). He’s clearly saying “They’re going to point out that I’m black.” Period. Exclamation point.

It offends me that Barack Obama would so casually attribute racism to others without evidence (name the Republicans who are using race!!!). It should offend every decent American. You want to know who’s really out there playing the race card? Obama’s own supporters, like Ludacris. It’s the left (think also of Jesse Jackson’s recent N-word fiasco) that is using race in a racist fashion, not the right.

Obama has denied he was referring to race, but his own chief strategist acknowledged that he WAS referring to race. Barack Obama, once again, is a documented liar. If you are going to accuse people like me of being a racist, Obama, you should at least have the moral courage and integrity to admit that you’re doing it.

As for Obama’s complaint, “and they’re going to send out nasty emails,” give me a break!  Liberals aren’t sending out anything nasty, are they?  Barack Obama complains that John McCain is attacking him in the very same conference that he not only attacks John McCain, but gets so low that he plays the race card without provocation.  This is first class serial whining and first class hypocrisy.  The Obama campaign’s “Audacity of Hope” has long-since abandoned “Hope” and relied upon “Audacity.”

Barack Obama’s statement – for all of it’s distortion of the truth – serves to remind us just how risky he truly is.

Even the leftist-oriented Rolling Stone acknowledges in its piece on Obama that:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.

Barack Obama has been steeped in radical politics since the day he emerged from his atheist secular humanist grad student mother’s womb. The openly communist Frank Marshall Davis was his childhood mentor; Saul Alinsky and Gerald Kellman (it was through Kellman’s Woods Fund that Obama met leftist terrorist William Ayers) dominated his thinking in college. He chose the most radical church in the country; he chose to make Jeremiah Wright his “spiritual mentor”; he chose to immerse himself in hard-core ideological radicalism. Never before has this country considered such a radical leftist for its chief executive.

Between a liberal-socialist media that openly wants Obama to be president, and between the fear over the charges of “racism” that await any meaningful exposition of Obama’s life and thought, Americans have been prevented from seeing who Barack Obama really is. It’s long-past time they found out.