I hate Joe Scarborough

I don't know why I do it to myself, but for some reason I have this habit of watching MSNBC's "Morning Joe" during breakfast. Probably just habit from when Don Imus was on. Imus, at least, could be entertaining at times, when he wasn't non-challantly tossing racial pejoratives around. Scarborough, on the other hand, is little more than a GOP hack with a penchant for naked dishonesty.

This morning, for instance, Scarborough took Paul Krugman to task for believing that the current economic crisis is an indictment of capitalism. Problem is, Paul Krugman has never claimed that the current crisis is an indictment of Capitalism, nor did Scarbourgh provide any citation or reference any writings in which Krugman is supposed to have levelled such a charge. Indeed, Scarbrourgh's claim is absurd on the face of it, considering that Krugman is Nobel prizewinning theorist of capitalism whose work has contributed tremendously to his fellow economists' understanding of the mechanisms by which international capitalist markets operate. But never mind all that. Krugman is a Democrat and an academic, and so he simply must be a Marxist.

When that glowing bit of dishonestly was done, Scarborough went on to blame the current economic crisis on regulations that forced banks to make mortgage loans to people who could not afford them. This is fast becoming the favorite Right-wing canard meant to absolve both the Bush administration, greedy lenders and unwise de-regulation for their just responsibility for creating this mess and it doesn't take a PhD to understand why: it allows them to blame liberals and blacks for the mortgage crisis. But it's also a piece of dishonesty so craven and so absurd you wonder why they even bother with it. Might as well blame Haitian Vooodoo priests for the crisis. After all, the Community Reinvestment Act to which Republicans like Scarborough are alluding was a piece of legislation passed during the Carter administration 30 years ago. The bad mortgages that caused the collapse of the housing sector were mostly written in the past eight years, many of them in the past five and at least half of them were made by entities that were not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act in the first place.

The mortgage crisis was a bubble, fueled by the absurd boosterism of people like Allan Greenspan, who should have known better, and by speculators who derived huge profits from exploiting unsustainable market conditions, the true nature of which had been obscured by the securitization of all that problem debt and the criminal negligence of co-conspirator bond rating agencies that seem to have granted AAA status to said securities by tossing chicken bones up in the air and seeing how they arranged themselves when they fell. There's nothing in the CRA that demanded the Fed Chairman extol the virtues of variable rate, reverse amortization, pick and pay, balooon rate mortgages. There's nothing in the CRA that demanded investment firms turn those mortgages into investment vehicles. There's nothing in the CRA that demanded mortgage lending agencies offer loans to un-creditworthy buyers that featured low teaser rates, which in some cases actually added to the principal, and which inevitably adjusted to unsustainable levels some five years down the line.

What the CRA does, however, is offer a convenient scapegoat to Republican politicians who have never given up on the "Southern" strategy of race-baiting and the stoking of white resentment that has served them so well in the past. Blame the negroes and the bleeding heart Yankees who love them. Hey, it's worked so far.