Monday, October 20, 2008

The Last Honest Man

And how did Demosthenes fare?

4 comments:

Tecumseh said...

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

Right. But that's only half of the story. Pepe & his friends called McCain a racist for bringing this up. Just a day at the office on Planet Pepe.

Mr roT said...

Barney Frank has nothing to do with it or you're a homophobe!

Tecumseh said...

Seriously, this is one of the few issues that McCain could have played to his advantage. For that, though, he should have taken the lead a long time ago in reining in the runaway lending and corruption at Freddie & Fannie. From what I can tell, he didn't do much about that -- if anything. Instead, he concentrated almost maniacally on those damn earmarks, which is essentially the only thing he can think of when it comes to economics and fiscal policy (plus his last-minute conversion to drill, baby, drill, which lost its edge with the fall in crude oil price). But, those earmarks he keeps talking about incessantly (evidently, since that's his only game), amount to something like only 18 billion a year in a trillion-dollar budget. And, in a day and age when we're talking hundreds of billions (or even trillions) of dollars of taxpayer money being thrown around, those pork-barrel earmarks seem like quaint, benign problems, by comparison.

Mr roT said...

I don't think voters care about real issues too much and can't do the accounting.

Earmarks are a political winner because they're seen as vote-buying and entrenching congressional privilege.