WASHINGTON — So intense have the Republicans’ suspicions of
their Democratic rivals become in the last weeks of this
presidential race that they are now accusing the delightful
Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden, of
withholding the results of his brain scans from his recently
released medical records. Their charge is false. The results of
those brain scans are spread across several pages of the
senator’s records for all to see. Admittedly those pages are
blank, but what did the Republicans expect, a fully stocked
cranial activity? Have they not been listening to the great man’s
solemnities on the campaign trail?
In an interview with his fellow airhead, CBS’s Katie Couric, late
in September, the senior senator from Delaware expressed his firm
belief that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United
States in 1929 and that in that illusory year FDR had at his
command a large and apparently receptive television audience. Ha,
ha, ha — and the mainstream moron media insist that Senator
Biden’s opponent, Governor Sarah Palin, “stumbled” when she was
interviewed by CBS’s cutie. Stumble Governor Palin might, but
Senator Biden fell head over heels and he has continued to do so.
There have been his repeated bold intimations that while flying
over Afghanistan in a helicopter he was forced down by enemy
fire. Actually, the threat was from inclement weather. Or savor
this: despite being caught years ago plagiarizing a British
Labour leader’s public recollections of life in the Welsh coal
mines, Senator Biden has again rather incautiously recalled being
a coal miner himself. His recollection is in error. In his only
debate with Governor Palin, he asseverated that the United States
“drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon” — a complete nonsense. Most
deliciously, this month he yawped: “The number one job facing the
middle class, and it happens to be as Barack says, a three letter
word, jobs, j-o-b-s, jobs” Possibly the senator’s handlers have
told him to avoid four-letter words on the campaign trail. At any
rate, for those of us who enjoy a laugh Senator Biden’s campaign
has been a picnic.
Now he is apparently collaborating with the McCain-Palin campaign
in stressing Senator Barack H. Obama’s inexperience. “We’re gonna
have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the
mettle of this guy,” Senator Biden warned, referring to his
running mate, Senator Obama, the least experienced presidential
nominee of either the twentieth or the twenty-first century. Oh
wait, I forgot Wendell Willkie, the “barefoot boy from Wall
Street” who ran against FDR, the television pioneer.
That the gaffable Senator Biden has not become the laughingstock
of this campaign is astonishing. Equally astonishing it the fact
that Senator Obama’s inexperience — though there have been a few
beautiful gaffes from him too — has not become an issue.
Instead, the members of the media and their fellow Democrats have
made a vexed issue out of the perfectly normal — albeit
abnormally charming—Governor Palin. The claim is that she lacks
the experience to be president. So too does the Prophet Obama.
The media’s coverage of this election has been the shoddiest I
have ever seen. The country has been walloped by a financial
crisis almost wholly created by the Democrats’ relaxation of
mortgage lending to low and moderate income borrowers. It is a
matter of record that the Republican nominee attempted to tighten
those regulations. The Democrats’ intrusion into the markets
began in 1977 with their vaunted Community Reinvestment Act,
encouraging bank loans to low and moderate income families. In
1995 the law was expanded, leading to an 80% increase in such
loans.
Along with this, beginning in 1992 Congress imposed on Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac to purchase what we now know as subprime
mortgages — that is to say, risky mortgages. In 1996 the Clinton
Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD), enthralled as ever to the Democrats’ urge for social
engineering, ordered Fannie and Freddie to assist home purchases
by low income earners seeking homes in higher income
neighborhoods — more subprime mortgages! HUD expanded this
project in 2000. Also in 1996 HUD began targeting the number of
such mortgages, requiring that 12% of Fannie and Freddie’s
mortgages assist low income home purchasers in higher income
neighborhoods. In 2000 the number was increased to 20%.
The consequence of all the Democrats’ meddling with real estate
markets and with established regulations was that these subprime
mortgages were secreted into bundles of mortgage packages and
sold all over the world. Now we see a crisis and magically it is
blamed on Senator McCain’s party. The answer is to elect Senator
Obama and his lovable sidekick to the White House. Yet, as
readers of this column read last week, the chair of Senator
Obama’s finance committee, Penny Pritzker, gutted her own bank
with subprime loans and has had to pay $460 million in penalties.
Moreover, Wall Street abounds with Obama supporters who prospered
on these subprime dealings.
What? What is this? Change the subject to Sarah Palin — you
betcha!
