The Really Big Short

In an article entitled "S&P Seen Surrendering to Tea Party Costing U.S. Taxpayer," Zeke Faux of Bloomberg illustrates why media is held in such low repute.  You see, the long-expected, well-deserved downgrade is not the result of anything having to do with the President's insistence on reckless spend-and-tax governance; his jihad to expand the size of government and its control over the nation's people and their behavior; his demagoguing of every negotiation to accuse the other side of wanting to suck up to fat cats and throw old people under the bus; his chastising others for failing to compromise or think of the nation's well-being while he refuses to budge on his statist-friendly strategies for redistributing America's power and wealth; or his slippery use of terms like balance, investments or fairness.  No.  Nothing is ever his or his party's fault.  Rather, according to Zeke Faux, it's the fault of the ubiquitous "Tea Party"--that perfidious boogie-man menacing the nation from its odious red states, or wherever abused taxpayers take a dim view of Democrats' vision for their wallets, nation and futures--or more precisely, S&P's capitulation to its awesome might.

Standard & Poor’s, the rating company that downgraded the debt of the United States to AA+ from AAA for the first time, now finds itself assailed by investors led by billionaire Warren Buffett for making a political decision that has more to do with Tea Party politics than the financial stability of the U.S.

Would that be the same Warren Buffet who led the charge of billionaire population controllers in favor of President Obama's candidacy?  Buffet backs the President almost as fervently as he champions abortion on demand, even while he's at odds with him on substantive economic matters such as cap-and-trade, card check, and tax incentives for corporate jets.  When asked in 2008 why he supported Obama over McCain, Buffet replied that he differed too much from McCain on matters of social justice.  Noman always looks to billionaire investors for guidance on what constitutes social justice, just as he looks to millionaire movie actors and actresses.  They know better, and they always seem to vote Democrat for social reasons. 

Faux next quotes that eminent statesman and economist, Barney Frank, to rebuff Republican claims that the Obama presidency is precipitating national decline:

Democrats disagreed. “We have the people who helped cause the financial crisis now claiming that they’re the experts on what the American budget should be,” Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a telephone interview before the downgrade was announced. “It’s beyond their competence and I’m just puzzled that people pay attention.”

Though he's posted on it before, Noman delights in having yet another opportunity to remind readers of "people who helped cause the financial crisis."  It indeed puzzles Noman why people pay attention to Frank, or the Democratic party.

The irony of it all is too much for Noman.  Assailed by Democrats for being too slow to downgrade subprime CDOs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the GSEs, S&P now finds itself being assailed by Democrats for reacting too quickly to political dysfunction in Democrat-controlled DC.  Moreover, after months of President Obama's hectoring opponents that unless things were done his (unarticulated) way the US was going to default on its debts, seniors were not going to receive social security checks, and armageddon was just around the corner, S&P is now blamed for taking him seriously.

“They think they’re giving an honest appraisal but they have instead become hopelessly entangled in the politics of the national debt,” Chris Rupkey, the chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Aug. 5. “The U.S. is not out of money, it has the financial resources to make good on its debt, and it should not have been downgraded.”

Noman wonders where Bloomberg was hiding Chris Rupkey when Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, Republicans  generally, and the bogie-man Tea Party were being excoriated for proclaiming essentially the same thing.  Perhaps S&P was being "hopelessly entangled in the politics of the national debt" by its silence while Democrats played politics with the nation's credit rating.

It gets better, yet.  Faux then trots out Paul Krugman to deliver the coup de grace.

“There is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously,” Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman said in a New York Times column. “These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.”

This from a man who claims on Keynesian grounds that the problem with President Obama's opportunistic $1 trillion slush fund for Democratic constituencies was that it was not large enough.  It should go without saying that, he, the New York Times, Bloomberg, all their lefty writers and editors, and the far-too-many practitioners of faux journalism are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

Noman's opinion on the big matter is that America's crippling problem is its President, a revolutionary in the Saul Alinsky mold, and the people leading the Democratic party.  Rather than being the leader of a nation, Barack Obama is the leader of a faction, which, incidentally, knows nothing about economics, disdains the notion of transcendence, and scoffs at the notion that means must be intrinsically moral--irrespective of the ends they serve.

Noman's opinion on the little matter is that media is an adjunct of the Democratic party, or vice-versa. There is nothing wrong with America that could not be fixed by a free press.  Media is badly in need of the affirmative action it so vociferously champions in other contexts.  Minimally, Zeke Faux should change his unfortunate last name, or stop living down to it.