| McCain just seems to make it worse and worse," Mr. Barr said in an interview this week. "In the debate, he gave this muddled answer about increasing government purchases of troubled mortgages. This is a self-described conservative Republican urging the Department of the Treasury to buy people's mortgages." |
Easy to holler back that Barr is the muddlehead. Easier still if one despises both dilbertarianism and H. Ross Perot.
Unfortunately the Fabulous Flyboy really did manage to be ambiguous on a key point. Despite his supposed love of town halls, the F. F. would do better readin’ from cue cards about everythin’ he does not thoroughly understand. (The weather and the grandkids and combat aviation are perhaps safe topics?) But he thought he could wing it, sayin’:
| "You know that home values of retirees continues to decline and people are no longer able to afford their mortgage payments. As president of the United States ... I would order the Secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those [house]s -- at the diminished value of those [house]s and let people be able to make those -- be able to make those payments and stay in their [house]s." |
How much would the neocomrade secretary be authorised to pay for these junk mortgages? That is the question that threw Planet Dilbert off the track. Correctly recalling "at the new value of the houses," I took for granted that the bad paper would be purchased at twenty or forty or sixty cents on the dollar. However the F. F. did not in fact say that, he only said "renegotiate ... at the diminished value." Hired handlers have subsequently explained that the mortgages would be purchased by the Treasury at face value, "diminished value" or "market value" applying only before and after that transaction. (That now-you-see-it-now-you-don't sounds a little loony, perhaps, but one must remember that the objective is rather to make sure bankers have
The doctrinaires of Planet Dilbert care little what the neocomrade secretary pays, of course, for they are opposed to Uncle Sam bein’ in Trade at all. Ancient aristocrats like Sam do not befoul themselves with the lucre of Mammon!
Still, the Concord Coalition clowns are probably howlin’ more or less along Barr’s lines, though they can logically object only to the overpayment. Yet they have more reason than Randites and Nozickians do to complain about ‘muddle’: though the Fabulous Flyboy was not in fact attemptin’ to deceive anybody, if he had been, the Concordites would be his obvious marks or dupes. The payment was not concealed at all, whereas anybody who distrusts Cap’n M’Cain and dislikes unbalanced books might easily conclude that some swindle is under weigh when folks do not frankly say in advance that they propose to pay more than goods are worth. Plus then explain why they are neither demented nor corrupt.
Nobody admires the Fabulous Flyboy’s intellect less than I, yet, as with Walden Pond and the Dow Jones Average, there must be a bottom to it down there somewhere! [1] Probably JSM more or less understands what his handlers tell him about the latest Endkrise des Kapitalismus, including the true purpose of this gimmick. So the creature Barr is simply wrong about "muddle."
I've already let the F. F. off the hook about "swindle" myself.
Nevertheless, the F. F. is not exactly livin’ up to his own self-courageous profilism in this matter. Unless Dr. Alzheimer is involved, it is not just an accident that he did not spell out the overpayment side of his handlers’ proposal unmistakably. Obviously the Commanderissimo of AEI and GOP and EiB was willin’ to solicit some credit for ‘populism’ that he did not deserve and should have known that he did not deserve.
The proposal has attracted a great deal less attention than I expected, and doubtless the Flyboy Handler Community is disappointed as well. But the episode raises some question about their IQ's as well, because the overpayment business would have to come out as soon as serious people began to pay serious attention. Had they thought it through carefully, the handlers might have done better to save their gizmo for the third debate, so that the F. F. could never be forced to admit in public that he was proposin' it for the liquidity of bankers rather than to create the happiness of Wunnerful Wasilla.
As matters stand, it will most likely drop out of public discourse like a rock. (Will the Dow-Jones be in three digits by the time of the next debate? Stay tuned!) Neocomrade Secretary H. Paulson seems to think that he could do as the F. F. suggests with the blank checks Congress has already issued to him, but he has boldly resolved on somethin’ even more so, namely to buy shares in the banks directly. Unlike the Fabulous Flyboy and his handler community, Secretary von Hindenburg and Chairman von Ludendorff do not have to worry for even half a second about lookin’ like W. J. Bryan rather than Scrooge McDuck. The whole Mortgagegate show might be a bit less repulsive if the gruesome twosome did worry about certain appearances a little more -- though perhaps it will be better at the end of the day for everybody to see the Harvard Victory School MBA's naked? God knows best.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Dilbert, the creature Barr will not, I expect, be entirely happy with the way the Associated Press has dealt with it. Almost certainly it spent a great deal of time expounding its constitutional and ideological objections to Mortgagegate, only to find the A.P. interested only in its badmouthing of J. Sidney McCain.
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[*] And so there is: "... a low class rank (894 of 899)...." (Dixit Wikipedia)
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