it makes my liver shrivel...,
2008-09-15 12:53:45
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Being something of a provincia...,
2008-09-16 12:13:16
the losing edge:
I'm really kind of surprised to find out that Joe Biden voted nay on the Financial Services Modernization Act. McCain voted yay. So, so far as a senator could have had a hand in creating the crisis, there really is no political reason at all for Obama to insist that McCain shouldn't shoulder his share of the blame.
For all the nonsense of people calling this a bitterly fought campaign and so forth, it is increasingly clear to me that neither party really wants to win. It reminds me of the episode of South Park "The Losing Edge", where the boys' baseball team keeps trying to throw championship games so that they can go home and play with their toys. Game after game, they fail to lose against opponents who are simply better losers.
McCain-Palin have thrown every lie and smear out just as undecided voters are beginning to make up their minds, giving swing voters plenty of time to accept the emerging media narrative that McCain-Palin are unelectable sleazepuffs, while Obama-Biden compliment their opponents at every opportunity for their serviceable honor and good honorable honorableness in order to combat the negative media narrative that would ensure an unwanted victory.
Don't let the recent Obama ad calling McCain a liar fool you, either: instead of calling McCain the sleaze he is themselves, they just read the media's insults about the untruthiness out loud. It's a brilliant strategy, like hiding behind the least popular kid in the class in a food fight.
This is probably the most expensive effort by two candidates to lose an election in the history of representative democracy. It's hard to blame anybody for not wanting to inherit the wreckage of the past decade, but the least they could do is stop begging for donations from people whose money would be better spent stuffing mattresses or playing the lotto.
update: Reconsidering it, it's very hard to see what the Financial Services Modernization Act actually had to do with the present crisis. The institutions that are surviving are folding into the combined banks it allowed, and it's got little to do with prior deregulations that allowed said institutions to more or less print money out of infinitesimal fractions of dollars. Froze them in place, perhaps, but that's the butt of the joke.
