Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, October 04, 2008 6:38:46 PM
Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? “Do Facts Matter?”
Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all
the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but
you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Unfortunately,
the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world,
depends on how many people can be fooled on Election Day, just a few
weeks from now.
Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.
The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back
into a substantial lead over John McCain — which is astonishing in view
of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on
this crisis.
Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Sen.
Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years —
including the present year — denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.
It was Sen. Dodd, Congressman Frank, and other liberal Democrats who
for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an
agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It was liberal
Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage
loans, which are at the heart of today’s financial crisis.
Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush
administration “right-wing ideology” of “de-regulation” that set the
stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?
We also hear
that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it
was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to
lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community
Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney
General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was
getting loans and who wasn’t.
Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?
Then there is the question of being against the “greed” of CEOs and for
“the people.” Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of
Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.
Who
in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including
Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom
referred to the “lynching” of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him
to the same standard as white CEOs.
The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself
on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not
officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser,
whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.
The tie
between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has
been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae’s financial
contributions, right after Sen. Christopher Dodd.
But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.
Facts don’t matter much politically if they are not reported.
The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public.
Republicans, for reasons unknown, don’t seem to know what it is to
counterattack. They deserve to lose.
But the country does
not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who
has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own
career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a
succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.