Honestly, the high jinks of the current administration are hilarious. Take the latest battle in Obama’s neosocialist war on American capitalism, the so-called financial reform law he is pushing through Congress.
Obama’s usual game is on display here: take a problem (say, lack of transparent trading regulations for derivatives), which could easily be solved by modest, bipartisan legislation, scream that it presents an unparalleled crisis (it helps to use the phrase “the worst since the Great Depression”), then claim that the crisis can be controlled only by a massive increase in state power. Then hit the campaign trail, demonizing some sector of private industry — here, investment banking — and if possible use a polarizing target (Saul Alinsky tactics are always a key part of the Obama game).
Obama hit the campaign trail, sure enough, and out of the blue, the Glorious Guardians of the American Investor (a.k.a. the SEC) loudly indicted Goldman Sachs. Incredibly useful timing, that! Very quickly and mysteriously, nasty emails written by Goldman Sachs employees (gloating over the housing crisis) appeared in the press, to ensure that the American public gets to experience the obligatory two minutes’ hate that is needed to get it on board.
However, the game didn’t go quite as smoothly as hoped, because of a couple of surprise revelations.
First, it turns out that Big Brother Obama and many of the bigwigs in the Red Congress were given lavish campaign donations by the selfsame Wicked Witch of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs. Indeed, Sachs was the second largest contributor to Obama’s campaign, giving nearly $1 million! As J.P. Freire noted in the Washington Examiner (April 20), Obama received seven times as much from Sachs as Bush did from Enron. Of course, while the mainstream media hammered Bush for this connection, with major attack pieces in Time (“Bush’s Enron Problem”) and in the Associated Press (“Bush-backing Enron Makes Big Money Off Crisis”), not to mention a documentary movie (“The Smartest Guys in the Room”), it all but ignored Obama’s ties with Goldman Sachs.
Obama, by the way, subsequently refused to return the money, even as he used the Goldman Sachs’ indictment as exhibit A in his drive to push his bill through. Needless to say, this fact was also virtually ignored by the mainstream media.
Second, even as the SEC tried Goldman Sachs in the court of public opinion, interesting news surfaced about the SEC itself. An internal report, done by SEC Inspector General David Kotz at the behest of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), indicates that 17 senior SEC officials are being probed for making extensive visits to porn sites on the internet — even as the country’s financial system was floundering and Bernie Madoff’s group was looting people’s life savings.
All this prompts the question: why is the administration talking about passing a welter of new rules, when even the
