The Loud Talker

President Obama more than once took shots at the Bush administration by mentioning the mess that he has inherited. This is directly in line with the campaign mantra of “eight failed years of Bush policies” that half of America bought into. But when you look at the facts you learn that Obama is on the team that helped create the problem we are facing. This has been well documented (and equally ignored by Democrats and their pet press cronies). Despite 9/11, Bush II enjoyed a strong economy for six years. What changed? 1) Democratic control of Congress, and 2) the much anticipated burst of the housing bubble. Republicans don’t entirely own this process, in fact, Democrats own the vast majority of the responsibility. But that’s not what the President said in his first press conference this week. (for some perspective on the first presser, read this and/or this.)

“As I said, the one concern I’ve got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what’s been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who — I don’t doubt their sincerity — who just believe that we should do nothing.”

As Ed Morrissey said yesterday, Republicans in both the House and Senate have offered at least two alternative stimulus packages.  None of them demanded that Obama “do nothing”.  In fact, it was the Congressional Budget Office and not Republicans that suggested that doing nothing might have a better effect than the Obama/Pelosi/Reid stimulus bill.”

Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, among others, are in complete denial of how this crisis was created. And Team Obama campaigned on the “eight years of failed Bush policies” slogan that is frankly a bald-faced lie. In fact, according to Barron’s, “Contrary to a view popularized during the 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation. The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them. Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.”

Let me repeat that. “The Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.” Even Liberal financial genius George Soros has opined on the cause of the crisis.

Consider how the crisis has unfolded over the past eighteen months. The proximate cause is to be found in the housing bubble or more exactly in the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage market. The longer a double-digit rise in house prices lasted, the more lax the lending practices became. In the end, people could borrow 100 percent of inflated house prices with no money down. Insiders referred to sub-prime loans as ninja loans—no income, no job, no questions asked.

Our economic situation was not created by “eight years of failed Bush policies.” It was not created by big oil or Dick Cheney. It was born in1977 under Jimmy Carter in the form of the CRC; it was strengthened in1995-1999 by Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Rubin “brokered a deal between the administration and Congress that allowed banking deregulation to move forward. Shortly after the compromise was reached, Rubin took a top position at Citigroup, which went on to embark upon mergers that would have been rendered illegal under Glass-Steagall. As the New York Times put it, Rubin would be leading “what has become the first true American financial conglomerate since the Depression”—a conglomerate that could exist only because of legislation he had just shepherded through Congress.” (source)

Our liberal friends are saying “But Bush was a de-regulator! It was the deregulation that did it man!” Wrong. GWB started raising red flags in 2001, and disclosed at a Congressional hearing in 2003 that “a new agency would have been 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.” What was the Democratic response to this suggestion? ”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not in a financial crisis,’‘ (source: see 2:25) said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in 2003. Personally, if we can jail the CEOs of Enron and Worldcom, I think Frank should be in jail for his poitical and financial negligence. He is willfully denying the truth that has put America in a scary place.

So, I implore President Obama to stop with the scare tacticts and stop with the lies. Stop blaming the previous president for the country’s woes and start doing something about it. And I don’t mean do anything, I mean do the right thing. Swift, knee-jerk actions made under diress do not usually have positive outcomes. Slow down, think this through. And for God’s sake please include both parties in the problem solving process. Nancy Pelosi’s exclusionary leadership is in direct conflict with her campign promise of a more cooperative, collegial approach that allowed for dissent and debate. Fifty Democrats are asking for help to control the Speaker, but I don’t think it is working. Maybe a cage match between Pelosi and Obama is needed to determine who is actually leading our country?