The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : 'Aggressive Capitalists'

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That's the term that the Washington Post uses awkwardly in an attempt to link together McCain economic advisers Phil Gramm (UBS vice chairman) and Carly Fiorina (former Hewlett-Packard CEO) in an effort to implicate them in the current economic downturn.

As in:

Former senator Phil Gramm, with his aw-shucks Texas drawl, may at first blush have little in common with Carly Fiorina, the telegenic former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. But they share a bond: Both are leading economic advisers of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and both have reputations as the kind of aggressive capitalists that may be sliding from favor as the nation's economy edges toward recession.

The people who are actually quoted making such claims are leftist economists Robert Reich and Jared Bernstein. And deeper into the story, the article acknowledges, "to economists across the political spectrum, much of the criticism is unfair oversimplification." So in other words, a few economists on the far left had lobbed ludicrous charges at McCain's advisers, that even other liberal economists find laughable, and yet the Post runs a front page story that is packaged as if it's an objective problem for McCain. The headline of the article is, "Economic Slump Underlines Concerns About McCain Advisers" rather than the much more accurate, "Liberal Economists Bash McCain Advisers."

As it happens, I was a financial reporter back when Fiorina was pushing the contentious HP-Compaq merger, and I never thought it was a good idea, and wasn't surprised when she was ousted because it was a failure. But it absolutely sickens me that the Post would engage in this sort of witch hunt for anybody with a business background.

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