The Next PartyofNoican War

Good Frank Rich today, as he lays out the next front for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to lie, distort, and, otherwise, continue their gameplan of obstructionism.



Obama, Lehman and ‘The Dragon Tattoo’

Anger over the last crash and the bailout of its high rollers spans the political spectrum, from neo-New Dealers on the left to Tea Party protesters on the right. As the battle over financial regulatory reform began in earnest with Chris Dodd’s introduction of a Senate bill last week, Lewis told an interviewer, “There is a war that is about to happen over not just who regulates Wall Street but what the rules are.”

The question for the politicians at the center of this battleground is simple enough: Which side of the war are they on? The Republican leadership revealed its hand unequivocally last week. Addressing the American Bankers Association, the party’s House leader, John Boehner, promised to delay and fight any finance-reform bill. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves,” Boehner instructed the poor, defenseless bankers. In late January he met the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, to make a pitch for donations. That may have been unnecessary. Chase and its employees, an A.T.M. for the Democrats in 2008, gave 73 percent of their contributions to the G.O.P. in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Republicans in the Senate will be no different. Mitch McConnell’s strategy of unmitigated obstructionism remains gospel there. Just as Charles Grassley and Olympia Snowe played the Democrats with months of fruitless negotiations on health care reform, so Richard Shelby and Bob Corker have been stalling a financial reform bill with similarly arid feints at “bipartisanship.” Corker insisted that any bill exclude regulation of extortionate “payday lenders,” who just happen to be among his biggest campaign contributors.

No doubt they will still be whining about healthcare, as they rev up the Right Wing Freak Show to go out and defend, honor and shower with platitudes, the slimeball Wall Street dwarfs, finks, phonies and frauds, who pulled the greatest heist in our history, thanks, in large part, to all that PartyofNoican deregulation.

Well, it will pump up the economy, to the extent Cable News covers it, and how many empty talking heads they rope in, and the shields we'll have to purchase, from all the flying bullshit that comes with it.