But... tell me how this is wrong:
A hedge-fund reader emails: "Reid, Schumer, and Pelosi are widely assumed to be stoking a financial Reichstag fire that would be a win-win for the permanent government. Conventional wisdom holds that economic chaos benefits the "out" presidential party, of course. Destruction of private wealth increases dependency on the central government. And a humbled private sector makes spinning the regulatory ratchet that much easier. Cynical, shameless, and in plain sight."
--Instapundit
A bunch of politicians want to implement a draconian/idiotic bailout -- that incidentally helps them quite a bit both in affixing blame to the other party AND in giving them a breathtaking amount of power come January 2009. Ostensibly they're "fixing" the economy, but nearly everything they say [by inciting panic*] or do [by intertwining Uncle Sam with the market] should identifiably have the opposite effect.
*- Charles Schumer only killed one bank. Did Harry Reid decide he had to up the ante and kill off an entire industry?
Look, I know full well that the dominant memes are that Republicans Are Evil, and in particular that it was somehow the GOP that caused people to sign up for mortgages that, if they had one lick of sense, they'd realize they couldn't afford unless the housing market kept going up forever.
But for all the economic wrongs the GOP supposedly committed over these past few years, none of them involved spending my money against my will, and certainly none of them rose to the level of wishcasting economic ruin for political gain.
Posted by Matt Bruce at October 3, 2008 11:25 AMcertainly none of them rose to the level of wishcasting economic ruin for political gain.
Vivid memories of this from the first months of Bush's term:
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/04/whitehouse.cheney/index.html
Bush and Cheney talked about how bad the economy was so as to push momentum for the tax cut and to make sure any blame for a recession fell on the Clinton administration and was out of the way before the 2002 midterm elections. There are a million other hits on Google for it, and to be fair, Democrats criticized them for exploiting the power of the Presidency (Congress in this case) in a way that would hurt real people.
If the Democrats were smart, they'd start talking down the prospects of major HMOs and health insurers so that Wall Street pushes them into bankruptcy and Obama can nationalize the health care system. (Seriously. The unwillingness of health insurers to commit suicide is why the Democrats can't do that.)