You really have to marvel at the way the GOP have decided to pull out all the stops and go Hell for broke into political irrelevancy. It was bad enough watching conservative CNBC commentator Rick Santellli telling struggling homeowners (or in his parlance "losers") to just go f*ck themselves while a crowd of Chicago mercantile exchange brokers, fat from the recent $700 billion Federal financial industry bailout, cheered in the background. But to have this guy's throughts seconded by conservative commentators who'd actually had time to read, digest and mull over the execrable essence and reprehensible hipocrisy of Santelli's rant was just astonishing. Perhaps conservatives are still wandering around in a fog after the thorough whopping they got in November, but their loss of political clout seems to have left them tin eared and politically blind. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted in commenting on Santelli's deranged Phillipic:
...there’s this startling bit from his rant from the trading floor:And now we have word that the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez is going gaga over the thought of a Sara Palin/Rick Santelli presidential ticket in 2012. It's almsot as insane as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford threatening to turn down Federal stimulus money in a state that's .5% away from double digit unemployment.SANTELLI: These guys are pretty straightforward and my guess is a pretty good statistical cross-section of America—the silent majority.If you think the makeup of the trading floor is representative of America, you’re just delusional. But a country of financial-services professionals does fit CNBC’s worldview.
These people are living in a fantasy world if they think their ideas appeal to anyone other than a hardcore base of survivalist nutjobs handling snakes at a backwater revival, watching the world collapse around them with glee, secure in the knowledge that our travails are a sign that the Second Coming is nigh. Really, these crazies make G. W. Bush's fabled bubble-habitat seem positively cosmopolitan in contrast. Marie Antoinette was guillotined for less.
7 comments:
You are right on! I was stunned by Santelli's appearance on Hardball, where he railed against the idiots who bought houses without having THEIR LAWYERS examine the fine print. The absurdly out of touch assumption that everyone has a lawyer....Oh my god. It tells you exactly where this elitist a-hole is coming from.
Umm...if you buy a house and *don't* have a lawyer, well, you shouldn't be buying a house. Seriously. Somebody at closing should represent the interests of the buyer and the seller. They're cheap, at least compared to losing your house on a technicality.
That said, Santelli's a flaming sphincter.
Santelli is exactly right. What is really wrong with America is that there are too many people that are hateful and jealous of the ones that got a good education and then a good job.
The only person I saw expressing hatred in Santelli's video was Santelli himself and the traders that we the taxpayers just finished bailing out to the tune of over $1 trillion. It really is stunning to me that the 29% who still side with the GOP are foaming at the mouth at the thought of rescuing the economy and ordinary working people from the Wall Street scam artists and predatory lenders that got us into this mess in the first place.
dear anonymous-
no, santelli is not right. yes, there are bad mortgages out there in the hands of people who shouldn't have them to begin with, but they were given these mortgages by someone. they didn't walk into a bank with a gun and say "give me a mortgage". the fault is the lending institutions who lend money, or rather coerce people to take loans, with little or no due diligence as to whether these people can even afford them to begin with. it's called predatory lending, something the wall street types encouraged because they can profit from them (credit default swaps, mortgage pools [fannie and freddie mac] and the like). wall stree types are some of the most self-centered greedy bastards on the planet.
The same credit providers who are now strangling the US economy with their untimely parsimony did more than their share to kneecap it when they fudged the numbers in regards to the loans with which they empowered fever-dream instruments like ARMs - & parasites like Santelli rejoiced as they turned them into yet more fuel for their pseudo-economy of eternal no-cost profit, fully aware that they would implode but too avaricious & soulless to care.
If the GOP wants to use a megalomanic derivatives-pimp like him as their new poster-boy, such suicidal myopia should be heartily encouraged at every opportunity. The Republican Party still isn't small enough to drown in a bathtub yet.
Dianne - my point is that A) Very few people buy a house with the help of a lawyer. The person representing their interests is supposed to be their real estate agent. Naive? Yes. But that's what people think.
B) Having the best lawyer in the world wouldn't have saved people from this trouble. The value of their homes tanked. The banks and realtors told them they could afford their loans. And then they got laid off....
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