Yesterday, commenter Cat Lady wrote:
NotW existed for 168 years, and it was gone in one week. The Church, the banks, the full faith and credit of the US, all going down. Some of us knew it was all bullshit, but now it’s becoming common knowledge. We’re being launched into uncharted territories, and we’re going to need a bigger boat.
I’d been thinking for a while that Murdochalpyse reminded me of the scandals in the Catholic Church. The abuse was so widespread and ignored for so long that when it came to light, it was stunning. I suppose the banking collapse was that way too, so many banks doing crazy stuff with subprime crap that any sane person had to know would blow up some day.
I’m having a hard time putting this in a way that won’t sound like an unhinged liberal rant against conservatives, but all of these scandals seem uniquely conservative to me, not just because they all took place within conservative institutions, but because they were driven by an unreflective, faith-based mode of thinking. With the Church, it was God’s on our side, so what we do is right. With the banks, it was the rational market is perfect so what we do is right With News Corp, it was we run the country so what we do is right. With the possible credit default, it’s tax cuts raise revenue, so what we do is right.
Maybe I’m wrong to think that this kind of unthinking belief in self-serving dogma is the hallmark of contemporary conservatism.
Redshirt
“It’s the End of the World as we know it…. and I feel” fine, I guess.
Clearly, we’re undergoing some pretty radical shifts in human history. Our population is SOOOO much larger than it’s ever been. Our tech is reaching Sci-Fi levels of wonder. Our culture/politics is being dragged along.
I get the distinct sense that those in the know are grabbing what they can while they can, for soon enough, the entire foundation will be swept away (oil), and replaced by something else.
There’s always pain in transition, but hope for improvement on the other side.
Han's Big Snark Solo
These days the GOP is so reality adverse everything related to reality sounds like a rant against conservatives.
What you are describing is what happens when ideology goes up against reality. The two don’t mix well in their pure forms very often.
Nutella
Well, if the Murdoch scandal is conservative then you have to consider ‘New Labour’ to be conservative since Tony Blair was a major participant.
Maybe it’s just that people in power, no matter where they came from, get to be raging conservatives (like Obama on whistleblowing and torture issues, for instance).
WereBear
Oh, it’s hinged, baby, it’s hinged!
DougJ in Damascus
I do to some extent. Moreover, Murdoch himself is conservative, he just likes to bet on winners.
ruemara
I’ll just give you props for Chinua Achebe, because I’ve been sitting in a financial meeting for an hour. Things are falling apart all over, and it seems that our officials are cutting them at the seams and calling it sewing.
geg6
Nope, Doug, you’re not wrong. That is exactly the hallmark of conservatism today. You know it every time you talk to some dimwit who believes Obama is commiefacistKenyanIslamist and that lowering taxes is, prima facie, the best and only way to make the government live within its means and who, despite all evidence to the contrary and no matter how that evidence piles up repeatedly in opposition to their faith, that they are right.
It’s a fucking religion. And I hate, hate, hate, hate fucking religions.
The Moar You Know
You are. It has been the hallmark of those who would stand athwart human progress, yelling “stop”, since the beginning of time.
someguy
It all comes back to the right’s epistemic closure. They are unable to accept reality, so pretty much all these disasters are, in fact,their fault. That they get away with it so often and don’t wind up lined up against a wall somewhere is testimony to one of liberals’ big failures, which is trusting people to generally do the right thing and not be batshit insane and destructive.
I don’t see a way out unless you can figure out how to make conservatives suffer the consequences of their choices.
NonyNony
Nope – that would be an Evangelical scandal or perhaps a more general Protestant one.
If you look at the pronouncements coming down from the hierarchy of the Church, you don’t get a “God is on on our side so we’re right” vibe. What you get is “we are the Church – what we do is right by definition. So shut up and get back in the pews” vibe. There have been things written by folks in the hierarchy that rise to the Nixonian level of “if the President does it it can’t be illegal”. The hierarchy doesn’t justify its actions based on what God proclaims – it justifies its actions because it is The Church and if it does something than it must be right.
And, frankly, this probably supports your thesis even more than if they really were hiding behind God’s invisible robes to declare themselves right.
sashal
since many years ago I noticed irrational behavior, dogmatism, rigidness and total obliviosness to the facts , desire to rewrite history, progressing craziness in many GOP members propped by endless, subtle and not propaganda and lies from approved sources(and whatever else comes from anywhere else getting rejected on the spot), I immediately had flashes of memory- that is exactly how devoted communists behaved in the old country, absolutely no difference , just a different dogma and different Pravda(FOX).
Mind you , my first years in USA I was voting straight repub, just reflexively going for an opposite of what I had before.
boy , how wrong i was.
opposite? not at all.
i wonder if modern average teabagger could meet the old USSR communist, i bet they would find a lot in common, i even say if those brainwashed humans by the freak of nature happened to be born in USSR they would have been devoted communists and many would make a carrier in KPSS apparatus.
that’s how their mindset works.
Give them a dogma and they will follow
DougJ in Damascus
Yeah, you’re right.
PeakVT
The abuse scandal in the Catholic Church seems like more like a classic circling the wagons action than something driven by ideology or hubris among the elites. Something fucked up happen, then the elites got involved. In the other cases the elites fucked up on their own.
Marmot
Only an Islamofascistcommieleft-liberalfar-leftleftist would second-guess himself!
beltane
An unthinking belief is self-serving dogma is the hallmark of authoritarianism past, present, and future. The essence of Conservatism is the belief that if the little children just shut up and do what Big Daddy says, there will be ponies and rainbows and a make-your-own ice cream sundae bar at the end of the day.
DonkeyKong
Oh, for most of human history laws have been for the little people. We really don’t know what we have had in the last fifty years I fear, even when it slips away.
I went to a dinner over the weekend in San Frncisco with some friends that are educated and doing well. The husband was railing against the 99’ers as lazy and the source of the country’s budget woes.
I said “a few banks piled twenty trillion dollars together, lit it on fire and fed the flames with the middle class of which you’re a part! The 99er’s are not anywhere close to the problem you think they are.”
He just shrugged.
Chris
No, it pretty much defines them to a tee. Doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on it, but it’s still a staple of everything they do.
bkny
#1 — bingo.
Violet
It’s “We’re rich and powerful. What we do is right.” That’s the real issue and can be applied in any of those instances you name.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In each of your cases, the players became so powerful and so corrupt that when the truth came out it was astonishing.
BO_Bill
Yes DougJ, you are wrong. First, we note that NewsCorp is a business, not a political organization, loosely identified with the center right. Now we turn our attention to the behavior of Progressive Religionists:
1. A group of Progressives physically attacks the editor of the Onion, breaking this young lady’s leg and smashing her face. The Onion is ironically a Progressive organization itself.
jwb
“Murdoch himself is conservative, he just likes to bet on winners.”
And, yet, he bet against Obama. Curious.
Phildo
And don’t forget: We support “family values,” so whatever we do outside of our marriages is right.
stuckinred
Tweety has Joe Walsh on and he’s not playing Rocky Mountain Way.
ornery
“so many banks doing crazy stuff with subprime crap that any sane person had to know would blow up some day.”
So if they had to know, they did know. Hmmm. So what does that mean?
JGabriel
@Redshirt:
Remember the sci-fi of the 60’s & 70’s, with space ships, and flying cars, and robotic vacuums, and flat screen TVs, and ubiquitous computers?
Well, the robotic vacuums, flat screen tvs, and ubiquitous computers are here now. Hell, with the right software, most of today’s computers can even talk and obey spoken commands. We’re halfway to Star Trek / The Jetsons! And maybe a lot closer to Neuromancer than any of us want to think about.
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Chris
Honestly, at this point I think we’re not far off from the U.S. Gilded Age model, where you had a party of Corrupt Bastards on one side of the aisle and a party of Not Quite As Corrupt Or Perhaps Just Corrupt In A Different Way Bastards on the other side, both beholden to the robber barons.
Blair’s New Labour and Clinton’s Third Way ideologies were better than the alternatives, but they did signal a major shift away from the traditional center-left platform their parties had had for most of the twentieth century.
Chris
Really?
All I got from them was the vibe that we hear from the military after every prisoner abuse or war crime scandal: “yes, it’s just AWFUL, but the REAL story here is that there are nasty enemies of the church/country who’re playing this way up in order to attack us, and we have to present a united front against them.”
MobiusKlein
Can’t have this discussion without mentioning Enron. Us in Cali still hold a bitter grudge about their screwing the electrical grid for some petty cash.
BO_Bill
2. One hundred and seventy eight (178) leaders within the Progressive Church falsify hundreds of thousands of standardized test scores within the Atlanta School System, pocketing the FedCash and sending the students away without an education. This act amounts to child abuse on a scale that dwarfs the Catholic Church.
I’ll stop here for fear of being Banished (again) as a Heretic.
El Cid
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The difference is that instead of taking millenia to be confronted with reality to some degree by the publicly involved section of the population and even by organizations and institutions, it takes less time to be exposed.
After exposure, though, it doesn’t mean it goes away.
In modern times it used to be much easier to show this sort of defiance-of-all-observable-reality in the 3rd world, given the extremes of forms of government and the catastrophic scales of the problems.
In Mao’s Great Leap Forward, it wasn’t just the stunningly, mind-blowingly horrendous drought and the lunatic uninformed move to collectives for farmers to each produce backyard “iron”.
The party’s leadership used insane ideologies to convince themselves that you could ignore ‘bourgeois’ methods of agriculture and use principles of Maoism-Leninism to make plants produce more yield.
Several tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation, and yet officials couldn’t tell the truth about what was going on else they’d be eliminated — both jobwise and biologically.
If the modern conservative movement had the sort of power Mao did, we’d be seeing Ark-based conservation strategies. More of them, I mean.
Apart from its power given the ability of a totalitarian regime to implement it, is there anything more silly in the proletarian agri-science revolution of Maoists than there is in the global energy budget increase deniers?
Xenocrates
It is my considered opinion that you are 100% correct. So there.
Chris
I do love how absolutely every conservative, no matter what his previous standing in the organization, immediately, immediately becomes “center-right,” a “RINO” or even “a liberal” the second he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar in a way they can’t spin.
Poor George W. Bush. And to think how much they loved you just in 2004.
stuckinred
BO_Bill
You are such a fucking moron that heretic doesn’t scratch the surface.
You left this part out didn’t you?
“It’s also a tacit indictment, critics say, of politicians putting all bets for improving education onto high-stakes tests that punish and reward students, teachers, and principals for test scores.”
Your fucking boy genius W instituted this crap didn’t he?
Turgidson
That’s maybe the best bullet-point descriptor of the modern GOP and affiliated conservative movement I’ve seen. It pretty much explains everything they’ve been doing for the past 30 years, and last couple years in particular.
jlowery
It’s amazing to watch the conservatives moan about how taxes are killing the economy, and how cutting government spending will provide jobs, and about the wonders of deregulation and the free market, even now.
I’m certain that the educated ones know it’s self-serving bullshit, but the advent of a perfect media echo chamber destabilized the system, indoctrinating enough of the electorate and electing enough know-nothings to seriously damage the machinery of governence.
There’s a lot of enraged ignorance out there, convinced that Obama caused the recession and government mortgages to the poor caused the financial collapse, and that if we just cut medicare and social security enough their kids will be able to find jobs. Confirmation bias rules, fed by NewsCorp and high-volume political advertising. Most will never learn, regardless of how much pain they endure at the hands of the well-to-do and the powerful.
I don’t know if there’s a way back from here. I hope there is, for my kids’ sake.
JGabriel
jwb:
Murdoch tried to broker a peace between News Corp. and Obama, and arranged a meeting between Obama, Ailes, and himself way back in 2008, before Obama won the election.
Apparently Ailes and Obama didn’t hit it off.
The point I’m making is that, yes, Murdoch is a pretty far right conservative, but even in the UK he can still make peace with Labour — if it suits his needs and desire to back winners.
One has to conclude that, in the US, Ailes is dragging Murdoch even further to the right than Murdoch’s own natural inclinations would typically lead him.
.
Brandon
I certainly hope this is not at all like the church or banking scandals. I both cases hardly anyone went to jail and those Bishops and Masters of the Universe are still around behaving like even bigger arseholes than ever. If that is the fate of Rupert and News Corp, please shoot me now.
Marmot
@ BO_Bill #19
Bill, you are a fucking liar. There’s nothing about the political affiliation of this mob, and nothing about the victim in question that would’ve suggested her workplace to the mob. Oh, and nothing about her own political leanings.
But I’m curious why you do it. Why do you just lie like that to protect conservatism? Don’t you care about, well, truth? Is your allegiance to the Right more important than everything?
Seriously, I’d like to know. It fits into the thread topic, even.
El Cid
The man portraying himself as the possessor of a baked-clay based heating system is a parody troll.
fuckwit
You missed one: the fall of the Soviet Union. Same thing: an unthinking, unreflective, unyeilding adherence to a rigid ideology, and a complete reliance on lies, bullshit and intimidation to keep itself in place– just like the catholic church, the capitalist banking system, the Repugs and their voodoo economics, and the Murdoch press.
Totalitarianism, really, is what all this is, and the USSR in Stalin and post-Stalin was a deeply conservative kind of institution, despite its “revolutionary” rhetoric dating back to 1917 and earlier.
You can rule based on bullshit and fear, for a long time, but when everyone knows you are full of shit, and is just playing along because they are either too afraid or too lazy to speak up (or both), then your system has already rotted from the inside, and it takes only a strong breeze to knock it all down!
This is what we are living through right now: the great unwinding of right-wing bullshit like religion and “free market” capitalism.
NonyNony
@Marmot
Because he’s a troll.
I mean come on – you don’t think that BO_Bill is really here to have any kind of discussion? He’s here to get people’s goats and then laugh when they reply to him. And possibly post even more inane responses and laugh when people reply to those too.
He’s not even a terribly funny troll. We used to get a much higher quality of troll around here (though, to be honest, most of them were probably DougJ in one form or another) and lately the trolls have been just weak.
Marmot
@ El Cid #37
Ah crap. Fished in. Suits me right for taking a breather from work!
Villago Delenda Est
What pisses me off is that the free market faithful obviously never read Adam Smith. Pretty much how the Jeebusites are unfamiliar with all four books of the Gospel.
A Mom Anon
@28,wtf are you talking about with this “progressive church”bullshit? Do you live here? Do you have any freaking idea what the problems here are in our schools? Hint:It’s WAY deeper than this freaking cheating scandal. And here’s another helpful hint,the APS system has around 60,000 students not hundreds of thousands. Shut up you purposely and willfully ignorant twit.
Brandon
@JGabriel,
Murdoch never made peace with Labour. The evidence is pretty clear that both Blair and Brown debased themselves before Murdoch and Brooks and in exchange for their obeisance, Labour was tolerated for so long as labour could withstand the humiliatory let them do anything they wanted
policomic
No, you’re not wrong, DougJ. What’s frustrating is not just the faith-based nature of these enterprises, but the faith-based tenacity with which the 27-percenters (and their MSM enablers) continue to defend the indefensible.
It’s the Stig O’Tracy syndrome: 1. Keep up the denial, no matter what (“I’ve been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.” “No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that….”) 2. When presented with denial-shattering proof, explain it away (“But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.” “Well he had to, didn’t he?…I had transgressed the unwritten law.”)
(relevant section starts at 5:06)
Marmot
@ fuckwit #38
I’ve wondered a lot recently about whether some people are just predisposed to greater tribalism than the rest of society. It would sure go a long way toward explaining the 27 percenters. And it might help explain how these conservative organizations manage to stick around so long.
wrb
The chimp video at the bottom of that article about the Onion editor is cool
lldoyle
“I do love how absolutely every conservative, no matter what his previous standing in the organization, immediately, immediately becomes “center-right,” a “RINO” or even “a liberal” the second he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar in a way they can’t spin.”
For the hard right types, failure and criminality are by definition moves to the center.
BO_Bill
Philadelphia youth are entirely Democrat, as are Atlanta teachers. The modern Democratic Party is nothing like former Democratic Party, which used to support blue-collar causes. The modern Democratic Party is the Progressive Party. As it has become clear to me that my work is not complete, here is one more (provided at great personal risk). Progressive outdoes Casey Anthony, and microwaves her one month old daughter.
She died because she was overheated,” said Dr. Marcella Fierro, retired chief medical examiner for Virginia. “She was cooked.”
Jeff Boatright
Sort of like liberals “believing” in Keynesian solutions to economic problems…
…the difference being that, as opposed to conservative dogma, liberal dogma/Keynesian solutions actually work in the real world…
Chris
Self to fanatically, devotedly Republican young friend from Philadelphia I met in college: you don’t exist!
Marmot
@ BO_Bill #50 Dang parody trolls. And I really did want to ask a real conservative why group membership is so gosh darned important.
jefft452
“…then you have to consider ‘New Labour’ to be conservative…”
Who doesn’t?
“the peoples flag is palest pink,
its not the color that you think”
LongHairedWeirdo
Part of the problem is that it’s not “conservative” but it is “Republican”.
During the housing boom, it wasn’t just housing that was being sold. It was bundled mortgages, sold as bonds, and bundled bonds, based on those bundled mortgages, sold as bonds, and it was credit default swaps – bets against the mortgages – and, this is the part that kills me – *bundled* credit default swaps sold as bonds.
At the low end, you had people having to make loans to make money, and to satisfy their superiors, all of whom knew, by the end, that they were playing a game of hot potato, but also hoping they could be the one who wasn’t holding it when the bell rang (or, were counting on pocketing their winnings and quitting).
But they were making money, see? And making money is good, right? That’s what the Republicans have been telling us for 30+ years.
But it’s *not*. Just making money isn’t good. The purpose of the economy is not to make money; it’s to provide useful goods and services, hopefully in an ever expanding cycle, where there ends up being more goods and services for everyone. That is a conservative idea – but it’s no longer a Republican one.
And right now, the unregulated financial industry is showing us that it will just make money without providing useful goods and services. I don’t just mean the housing boom and bust. The dot-com boom was another example. There was a time when *no one* would have made an IPO on those companies; there needed to be a business plan, some stable money making, and a plan for long term profits. After all, that’s what a stock offering is supposed to be – purchase of a share of future profits. But, IPOs were made, a big bubble was inflated, and who got rich? The financial companies… no one else. But for heaven’s sake, don’t regulate them! Because if you regulate them, they might not have a chance to blow up another huge bubble!
Villago Delenda Est
Those darn liberals “believe” in evolution, as well, which is, you know, a theory.
So we’ve got two examples of the Inigo Montoya effect (“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) in play in that last sentence.
El Cid
You want to know the insider’s view of the actual upper class on contemporary economics and politics?
The guy working for the super-rich’s financial interests telling a famous sociological researcher (no new contact, a decades-long friendship) on how his own clients’ activities and the situation favoring them placed and places our entire society at increasing risk?
Consult the source reprinted by the USA’s most accomplished and best researcher of the domination of US economics and politics by the upper classes, G. William Domhoff.
Galtian “job creators” indeed.
Systematic studies of the power elite involving participation by the elites themselves are rare but by no means unheard of. This analysis by this functional financial expert based on his and his clients’ observations is more related to the points made than an empirical survey of which other super-rich people agreed.
What a paranoid leftist conspiracy theorist incapable of realizing how much like quantum physics investment banking is, beyond the capability of mortals like us who foolishly dare to have watched with horror our political establishment’s enabling of such destabilizing rapaciousness over decades no matter how many times deregulation exploded into public indebtedness.
Of course, the problem is all the gubmit spendin’ and the inflation and all the taxes.
As to the anonymity of the source, (a) the information itself isn’t remarkably new outside its working in front of the person monitoring the rich’s investments; and (b) there are literally decades of empirical research by Domhoff to use to evaluate the reliability of his evidence and work.
Unfortunately, neither of these so-called experts seems to realize that the problems in the economy are the fault of Jimmy Carter letting Barney Frank give free houses to ACORN.
Elie
We are a spoiled people. We don’t remember national catastrophe and privation on mass scale. The folks who DID experience that — the WWII generation are just about gone. They know. They lived through eating rudabaga 7 days in a row during the depression, the enormous cost in flesh and spirit of the 2nd world war and the dust bowl of the 30’s. We know nothing — NOTHING. We believe if we cuss and swear and turn over tables, flip off anyone who disagrees with us, well, we win, don’t we? Negotiate? Compromise? Respect another’s opinion? Respecting how fragile our vaulted position in the world remains? What that means? No. We don’t.
But we may be close to finding out. All that bending over and shooting the moon to consequence and handing an intact future to coming generations — the gods don’t like that shit and have a way of sticking it where it really hurts…. We allowed fellow citizens to vote us into insanity and are unable to stop the people who they selected from hurting us badly. Our hope is the skinny black guy.
I pray every night for Obama and for us — that we be spared what we truly in some ways deserve for the sin of not respecting history.
El Cid
__
I remember begging Democracy For America not to back the candidacy of China Arnold for the position of Chief DNC Child Care Advocate, particularly given her “Your child can be done in 30 seconds or less!”
brendancalling
“Maybe I’m wrong to think that this kind of unthinking belief in self-serving dogma is the hallmark of contemporary conservatism.”
Nope, you’re not wrong. That is indeed a hallmark of their “thinking”, along with a clinical lack of foresight and an absence of empathy. To be a republican is to be mentally ill.
Catsy
@geg6:
Actually, I don’t have a problem with the fucking religions–they tend to be pretty mellow and earth-friendly.
It’s the regular sort that piss me off and do so much damage.
brendancalling
a BO bill: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/07/19/things-fall-apart-2/#comment-2679483
Fuck you, you stupid lying piece of shit. I live in Philly. That was a bunch of teenagers running rampant. You are a LIAR. What you said was NOT TRUE.
Typical mentally ill conservative. thatnks for proving my point that you and the rest of your ilk are nothing but sociopaths.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
That’s why I’m here, my dear – because it ain’t the motion of the ocean. But don’t call my home line, use my cel number.
.
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Villago Delenda Est
57 El Cid:
They are parasites. Pure and simple. Malignant and remorseless.
The Populist
Fine, one example of teachers NATIONWIDE were caught cheating. Guess what shithead? If your fucking party would stop whining about test scores and let teachers TEACH like they did when I was young (I am a business owner, still doing well) maybe, just maybe, we will see success.
Should I post the article about the school district in Detroit where there are no administrators? Teachers are like VPs…they get a classroom and teach using the curriculum. Scores and grades are up. Kindly take your dogma and fuck off…thanks.
les
@JGabriel:
To say nothing of “The Sheep Look Up” and “Stand on Zanzibar.”
The Populist
@Brendancalling
No surprise. BO is a concern troll. He’s just another worthless idiot talking up his brand of lies to evoke a response. Facts melt him the way water melted the wicked witch of the Wizard of Oz.
The Populist
This. Problem is, we never learn from history. If we continue voting in idiots, we will get exactly the pain we fear. Argh.
El Cid
__
When it comes to the super-rich and the extremely powerful, we are required to presume good intentions until we have holographic real-time self-incriminating testimony with simultaneous teleportation of receipts showing ill-intent directly into a meddle-free vault.
Which we never get. So this means that presuming vile intentions (whatever ideological maneuvers are internally practiced to warp such intentions into well-meaninghood) on the part of the leaders of our economy and our political system is done solely by bizarre and hyperventilating leftists and breathless over-hyped journalists and bloggers.
When it comes to ordinary folk, then it’s okay to look at people who profit off of disaster (and even deadly negligence), disasters which they helped cause, as being done in bad faith, whether directly (“I AM EVIL AND I FULLY INTENDED FOR THAT PERSON TO SUFFER FOR MY ENRICHMENT”) narrated or simply callous negligence (“LOOK I HAD NO IDEA THAT THAT YOUNGSTER’S HEAD WOULD BE CRACKED B/C OF MY CO’S BICYCLE HELMETS MADE OUT OF EGGSHELLS GLUED TOGETHER BUT IT’S CLEAR LOOKING BACK THAT I REALLY SHOULD HAVE WORKED HARDER”).
Bender
No shit, Doug? Wonder why that is…
These “clapper” posts are always stupid. When all you have is a hammer, I suppose.
You’re working hard to ignore the Democrats’ very non-market “Community Reinvestment Act” and everything Barney Frank ever said or did in the last 3 decades (“these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis”) which set up the circumstances under which the subprime loan disaster could occur. I can understand why would do that.
With President “I Won” in the White House pushing through the biggest partisan spending programs in history with zero Republican input, this seems less like a conservative mindset than a liberal one.
I could just as easily (with the added bonus of being more correct) say this is a liberal problem — “We have printing presses to pay for entitlements, so what we do is right” — caused mainly by a massive spike in government spending under Obama, rather than a slightly-recessionary revenue line.
Villago Delenda Est
Bender, you realize of course that you’re the poster boy for fucktards, right?
El Cid
None of this would have happened if Barney Frank hadn’t made Jimmy Carter make banks give all those free homes to ACORN. It’s true because it is.
Bender
Ah, that classic Villago wit. Or half of it.
Citizen_X
Umm…no. Obama’s spending only added about 10% of the deficit rise; the recession, over 30%.
What the fuck does this even mean? Does the ACA have some sort of screening for Republican-Party membership that I missed?
BTW: for you, your nym sucks. I would much rather hang out with the fake-real Bender, and he’s a misanthropic robot.
pluege
all of these scandals seem uniquely conservative to me
“conservative” is not an ideology or a philosophy, or government policies. Its a word we use to identify psychologically damaged individuals; hyper insecure, prone to violence, obscenely and obsessively greedy, willfully ignorant, fundamentally sadistic.
Bender
That’s not entirely accurate.
But Barney the Gay Pimp railed against Bush’s push to regulate Fannie and Freddie, saying that everything was just fine. That Frank is a freaking Genius, or so you guys keep saying…
Nutella
@The Populist:
Please do. Sounds very interesting.
Cat Lady
W00t! Out doing stuff all day, and find out I’ve missed my own thread. Thanks DougJ – perfect post title, but I think I’d add the tag We’re All Mayans Now. Also, too.
priscianusjr