Lies, lies, and still more lies issue from the mouths of leftists
as they continue beating the class-warfare drum and demonizing
Wall Street and the capitalist system itself in order to promote
President Obama's nakedly statist agenda.
Amidst all the vomit-inducing phony outrage in liberal circles
about AIG's payment of retention bonuses to employees,
left-wingers continue to faithfully parrot the lines written for
them (perhaps by the intelligentsia at the secretive
JournoList.)
In an orgy of sanctimony the Left continues to argue -despite all
evidence to the contrary- that the Bush years were an era of
regulatory relaxation. (Would that it were true.)
Take the case of Faiz Shakir of John Podesta's propaganda
factory, the allegedly nonpartisan Center for
American Progress.
Shakir, who appeared on MSNBC today and didn't object when
identified as a "Democratic strategist," is just one of many
liberals attempting to create this myth of Dubya-era
laissez-faire that is designed to be lapped up by lazy
journalists, the uninformed, and the plain old gullible:
"I think there's been a culture of greed in Wall Street and
there's been a culture of tolerance in Washington but that was
really largely over the past administration. For eight years we
tolerated these obscene profits from Wall Street, deregulation
was the norm here in Washington and that was handed over to
[Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner and the Obama
administration," Shakir said.
If anything, the Bush years saw an explosion of
regulatory activity.
As Scott S. Powell of the Hoover Institution
notes, "The Bush administration made many mistakes, but
deregulation was not one of them. Not only was there no major
deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush
administration and a Republican Congress approved the most
sweeping financial-market regulation in decades."
Powell is referring, of course, to Sarbanes-Oxley,
which needlessly imposed tremendous costs on business.
Another culprit was ridiculous
"mark-to-market" accounting standards that help strangle
otherwise healthy companies.
Don't expect to hear any of these points raised by the Left. To
liberals, government can do no wrong - unless it's the Bush
administration.
