Res Ipsa Loquitur

I dare you all to click on the links and read the whole thing, as they say. But it basically boils down to this: any adult person, of any political persuasion, who sat in the room with Paulson or John McCain during the TARP negotiations during the 2008 campaign has to know, deep down, that the entire notion of a workable "free market" and its Potemkin Political Party is a fraud, a farce, and a straight up con game.

I just want to put this:

All weekend I'd been wearing my crisis armor, but now I felt my guard slipping. I knew I had to call my wife, but I didn't want to do it from the landline in my office because other people were there. So I walked around the corner to a spot near some windows. Wendy had just returned from church. I told her about Lehman's unavoidable bankruptcy and the looming problems with AIG.

"What if the system collapses?" I asked her. "Everybody is looking to me, and I don't have the answer. I am really scared."

I asked her to pray for me, and for the country, and to help me cope with this sudden onslaught of fear. She immediately quoted from the Second Book of Timothy, verse 1:7—"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

and this:

It was brilliant political theater that was about to degenerate into farce. Skipping protocol, the president turned to McCain to offer him a chance to respond: "I think it's fair that I give you the chance to speak next."

But McCain demurred. "I'll wait my turn," he said. It was an incredible moment, in every sense. This was supposed to be McCain's meeting—he'd called it, not the president, who had simply accommodated the Republican candidate's wishes. Now it looked as if McCain had no plan at all—his idea had been to suspend his campaign and summon us all to this meeting. It was not a strategy, it was a political gambit, and the Democrats had matched it with one of their own.

together with this:

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham.

Why yes, yes it does.

aimai

In the Land of "Might Have Been" McCain Would Have Already Gotten Us Health Care Reform!

Turns out that McCain's Economic Brain Trust is Flat Busted:

Holtz-Eakin said he's been paying about $1,000 a month to extend the private health insurance he received on McCain's campaign through the government's COBRA program, but that will expire in a few months. This is the first time in his life he has not had employer-provided health coverage. "I worry about where I go next in the way many Americans do," he said. But although Holtz-Eakin dresses the part -- on this day he wore a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt with cuff links and a powder-blue tie -- he is in no hurry to find full-time work. He said he'll get a job when he's ready, even if it means buying an individual health insurance plan at an exorbitant premium.

"Let's not whine too much about me," he said. "I'm a wealthy, affluent American in the big picture."

Despite his personal trials, however, Holtz-Eakin said his conviction on the hot-button issue of health care is unchanged. He believes that reform is needed, but that President Obama and congressional Democrats are going about it the wrong way. The system is "broken," he said, but the bills now before Congress do not cut costs enough. On the campaign trail, Holtz-Eakin promoted McCain's plan to eliminate the tax exemption for employer-sponsored health insurance and give tax credits to individuals to buy their own coverage.

Of the bills moving through Congress, Holtz-Eakin said: "I wish the policies were different, and I wish I could've somehow gotten us to a bipartisan place. I think McCain had the capacity to do that.

"But the reality is what it is," he continued. "You can't live your life in the land of what might have been."

What I find astonishing about this article is that it comes right up to the water's edge of the reality of most Americans, dips its toe in, and then runs back for cover. If Mr. Holtz-Eakin is the divorced father of two children who is paying for his children's health care coverage? How would his suggested "fixes" for Health Care affect his wife's premiums, or her employer's liklihood of continuing family coverage for her? Who pays for his mother's health care coverage if it isn't Medicare--and if it is Medicare why does the article (and Holtz-Eakin) ignore that fact and ignore the historic attacks on Medicare levied by McCain and the entire Republican party?

How can a presumably intelligent man look at all the data and imagine for one minute that McCain--a notoriously unpleasant and difficult egomaniac with little insight into economic issues could have "gotten us to a bipartisan place?" But I suppose its all of a piece with the fact that he still believes that taxing employer health care benefits and subsidizing the purchase of junk health insurance would solve his personal medical insurance issues, let alone make a dent in those of the rest of the country.

There Are Known Knowns, and Unknown Unknowns, and then there's WTF?

From a reported exchange of views on Afghanistan:

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) said everyone at the table in the State Dining Room shouldered part of the responsibility for the decision.

A Senate aide told TPMDC that Kerry said, "Mr. President, this is your ultimate decision, but it's shared by the Congress because together we have to hold together the consent of the American people for this policy, that's one of the lessons of Vietnam."

McCain later said he disagreed with his colleague. "This is your decision - your sole decision," he told Obama.

Lately our political discourse seems to me to have become not merely more opaque but ultimately insane. Its partly the abymsmal reporting and editing. But its partly because people like McCain don't mind acting out like toddlers having a sugar induced meltdown. I can't even figure out what this exchange is supposed to mean. McCain is supposed to have urged Obama to quick, decisive, action because after 8 years the next five minutes are always "of the essence." To me this is like the fat man on the elevator screaming at the skinny guy who gets on last that he is responsible if the elevator falls. Kerry seems to have done the gracious and logical thing and pointed out that every single person in that room, who has been around for the last eight years, bears some responsibility to think this through carefully. McCain seems to be stuck on using an actual war, and the deaths of thousands of people, as a manly way of sobbing that he would, too have been a better president than Obama.

aimai