Sunday morning C-SPAN weirdness

I'm not sure why I do this to myself. I swear the tinfoil hat callers outnumber the sane ones about five to one. Of course, it doesn't help when they're being encouraged by some talking head who's insisting with a straight face that the reason the economy is a mess is all those dumb, black people couldn't tell the difference between a fixed rate and an adjustable rate mortgage. According to this morning's Republican puppet, the bankers weren't to blame at all if borrowers fell for their snake oil pitches. Whatever happened to the days when lenders were presumed to have the intelligence to determine whether or not a borrower had the ability to pay? Oh, right. Silly me. I forgot -- that philosophy vanished about the same time Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and the rest of them decided that they could sell worthless pieces of paper to each other and create nonexistent wealth. It was a Ponzi scheme on a massive scale, a fraud that could only continue as long as all the pieces of paper kept moving -- but once they stopped, the bubble had to implode, and now we're all suffering the consequences.

I did notice Barney Frank now has a co-conspirator in his plot to bring down America: Maxine Waters. It's absolutely astonishing how much damage those two Democrats managed to do during eight years of a Republican administration. Apparently whoever's in the White House doesn't matter at all because Bush and his minions were seemingly totally powerless in the face of the demands of two, count 'em, TWO congress critters. But, according to the rightwing talking heads, between Frank, Waters, and the evil organization ACORN, we're now all in deep doodoo and sinking deeper.

And, oddly enough, although poor aWol was totally powerless in the face of the determined efforts of a handful of Democrats, the same isn't true of his successor. It's now all on Obama. If he can't turn things around, it's not going to be the fault of Republican naysayers like Senator Mitch McConnell or Representative John Boehner. Nope. Totally Obama. Once there's a Democrat in the White House, Congress apparently becomes irrelevant. Democratic Presidents are apparently supermen, while Republicans are just pathetic figureheads, mere puppets with no real power or influence. Well, I'm not going to argue that one when it comes to aWol -- if that's how his own party wants to label him now, fine with me. Now if they'd only admit it was Darth Cheney pulling the strings. . .

I am also noticing, of course, the not-so-thinly-veiled racism many of the callers exhibit. They all seem to assume that every person being foreclosed is black and lives in some wretched inner city neighborhood where banks should never have ventured because "everyone knows those people don't pay their bills." One caller was practically spitting through the phone in anger that banks had ever been required to stop redlining. Yep, he actually blamed the melt-down on the crackdown on redlining around minority neighborhoods. If only the financial institutions had been allowed to continue discriminating, we'd all be fine now and, I assume, he could afford a new hood for the next Klan rally. The stupid, it burns.