The American Spectator

Does the phrase “double standard” ring a bell with any readers out there? Good for Katie Couric that she’s a hardworking soul who has ambition and may be a quick study. But by her own standards, she should never have been given a Pentagon press pass back there in 1989.

p> ASSUMPTION TWO: Where is it written that when members of Congress screw up big time — like, say, Wall Street executives — only the Wall Streeters are going to be investigated? (At the moment the FBI has opened a number of investigations into the Wall Street belly-ups.) Are any of the people on Wall Street or at Fannie Mae who caused this problem going to be summoned from their cushy lives to clean up Wall Street and investigate what happened? Are you kidding? But yes indeed, our friends Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and recipient of a cushy deal from Countrywide Financial, is going to look into all of this. So too will Congressman Barney Frank over in the House, where he used his perch on the Financial Services Committee, of which he is now chairman, to shield Fannie Mae from calls for tightened regulations. Calls made by then-Bush administration Secretary of the Treasury John Snow and Senator John McCain, among others. Said Barney on the floor of t he House on June 27, 2005 (highlights mine): br> /p>

“This is not the dot-com situation. We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality and people building fiber-optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you will not see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.”

br> Right. Thanks for the look into the liberal crystal ball Congressman Frank.

So now the question has to be asked in the new paradigm. Who will investigate the greed for political power? Who will investigate Chris Dodd (33 years in Congress) and Barney Frank (27 years in Congress)? Dodd alone received not one but two cushy deals for nearly $800,000 in mortgages. He received $133,900 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. And he is assailing greedy capitalists?? Why are these two guys still serving as Chairmen of their respective committees? Why are they involved in any fashion whatsoever in structuring the bailout package? Who in the Senate and House will now pick up the ball and insist that these two rogue politicians be dismissed from their posts and investigated — for their conduct, their ties to the industry they were charged to regulate, their campaign contributions from Fannie Mae, and their precise role in pushing the entire financial system of the United States to near-implosion. And how about a little straight talk on the greed for power?

p> ASSUMPTION THREE: The paradigm that the New Deal is the gold standard for American government. For this we turn to the late Senator Barry Goldwater, who wrote the following in his classic The Conscience of a Conservative almost fifty years ago: br> /p>

The government must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate — from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals. I do not suggest that the federal government drop all of these programs overnight. But I do suggest that we establish, by law, a rigid timetable for a staged withdrawal.

br> Do the words Fannie Mae mean anything in this context? Fannie Mae is a New Deal chestnut from 1938, but why stop at Fannie Mae with the new paradigm? As Senator McCain says over and over again, government expenditures are now completely out of control. For those of you with liberal friends who keep chanting the Obama mantra of change, suggest the Goldwater principle above and see how fast the Obama-acolytes race in the other direction. The single biggest con of the Obama campaign is that it is committed to serious change. Obama is a prince of the New Deal Establishment. His role as a community organizer was not to get rid of government bureaucracies and create jobs. It wasn’t a fight for change. It was a fight to beg for favors from government bureaucracies, to milk the status quo. As a liberal Senator he is reflexively committed to extending the status quo. Listen to this unnoticed remark from the debate the other night as Obama responded to McCain’s suggestion that there be a freeze on federal expenditures:

“The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are underfunded. I want to increase early childhood education…”