"COME TJ, you cant NOT beleive that. He has been in office 8 years and on the very eve of the election, all of a sudden everyone gets religion."
i'm not saying that there weren't problems at fanny and freddy. i'm not saying that democrats are blameless. but all this happened on bush's watch. congress rubber stamped all policy coming from the white house and RNC for 6 years. there were no hearings, no public analysis of these issues by congress for all those years.
sure, many people must have known that this was coming, because i knew all this was coming, and i have far less information than many others.
but the question isn't who is to blame. it is, where do we go from here? if everything had gone swimmingly over the last 8 years, i want to see ron paul as president. i'm a libertarian, after all.
but we're in a big mess. who is the realist here? i listen to fox news, as i'm doing right now, and person after person comes on and says, oh, just let all the banks fail, no bailout, yadda yadda. these people are not realists. they don't get it. the banks haven't lost *their* money, they lost *our* money. there are principles. and then there is the recognition that there are critical times when government is the only one that can step in and hope to fix problems without everything falling apart. unfortunately, the consequence of that will be regulation, to make sure that moral hazard doesn't raise its head in the future. but the experiment on deregulation and trickle down has been run. and it has failed. greenspan himself has finally admitted that the whole notion is flawed.
however, getting your panties in a bunch over fannie and freddy, and not yelling aboug phil graham and legislation helping bear and morgan stanley and goldman is completely one-sided.
yet, i think, the simple question for this election is: which candidate will gather the right people in the room, will listen to them, and will settle on the best plan to take us forward? which candidate will have the support and the skill to convince the public to go along with that plan, even if it is painful? obama talks of sacrifice and people cheer him. mccain says he wants to give you your money back and get government out of your way. i think only one of these will have the political capital to enact the significant change that is needed. even if i liked his ideas, i'm confident that mccain would be an impotent president. and that is exactly what we don't need now.
