Chupacabra Report

I enjoy the Marketplace show on American Public Radio, but I’ve heard a couple of bits lately from David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute that are starting to get my goat. Frum is a conservative from Canada who has drawn paychecks from the Wall Street Journal and the Bush/Cheney White House. His latest patron is the A.E.I, a Washington think tank that employs Tory dimbulbs like Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich, and has taken over a million dollars from Exxon Mobil to dispute Climate Change.

I heard Frum last month complaining about the lack of business experience on the Supreme Court, as if the court had been hostile to the corporate governance of this country. Six or seven Justices are millionaires, and most have sizable holdings in stocks and investment accounts, some have had occasion to recuse themselves from certain cases to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. Does Frum think that we should seat Steve Forbes and Rupert Murdoch to quash the War on Capitol?

And just the other day I heard him go on about housing initiatives during the Clinton and Bush years bringing down the economy by selling houses to people that couldn’t afford them.

This is the meme we hear from Republicans explaining how the Bush Recession delivered a major hit to everybody’s net worth. John Boehner spouted it at the GOP Senate-House Dinner; that the crash happened because some people bought more house than they could afford, and because some people don’t pay their credit card bills on time.

Nothing about the unsustainable level of public and private debt built up since the Reagan administration, nothing about the Republican-led repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that reformed practices that brought on the great depression, or the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, that Phil Gramm or maybe Ken Lay wrote that commenced world-wide speculation in the modern equivalent of tulip bulbs. Nothing about the financial sector of the economy eclipsing the manufacturing sector in recent decades, of the infallible wisdom of “the market,” which nevertheless requires frequent bailouts from the taxpaying public.

If Republicans think that they have to lie about the causes of the Bush Recession, why don’t they stick with the “gay marriage killed the dinosaurs” line. Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern offers the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality." It reads like something we might hear from Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps..

The proclamation states: "Whereas, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and Whereas, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse ,and many other forms of debauchery."

What a crock..