BartBlog

Gore Vidal, Truthdig, December 18, 2007

I don’t know how many of you were as appalled as I was at the way that the presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was totally erased from the last Democratic debate held in Iowa. This was a decision that was made, I can tell, jointly by the one-time voice of AIPAC, Mr. Wolf Blitzer, and, at the same time, The Des Moines Register – or whatever it is called – a paper of no consequence for the United States of America.

Elements of right-wingism are keeping his voice from being heard, even though there are many millions of us (Kucinich is ahead of both Biden and Dodd in the national polls) out here who like to hear his voice. He is in the great tradition of the original People’s Party of the 1880s; he is in the tradition of George Washington and of Thomas Jefferson, and to silence him with a bunch of political hacks who have made such a mess of our political system, pretending these were the only voices who could talk as presidential candidates … is it because of their campaign budgets?

Now, I know, as all of you know, that people can come in with millions of dollars, like Romney and so on, and can buy time in Iowa and in the North Pole or wherever it is they are running. They can buy it, but to get an honest member of Congress speaking out for the people of the country is a great and rare thing.

I have listened to many political debates in my lifetime, if I may pull rank because I have been around longer than anybody else, and here is a voice not only against the war but the entire course leading us to it. I haven’t heard anybody who has ever listened to Kucinich who didn’t say, “Oh yes, yes, what he says is true, but nobody will ever take him seriously.”

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, December 21, 2007

When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave this week for the Fed’s locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone decision to modestly strengthen regulation of the mortgage industry: “Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”

That’s quite an understatement. In fact, the explosion of “innovative” home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.

But maybe Mr. Bernanke was afraid to be blunt about just how badly things went wrong. After all, straight talk would have amounted to a direct rebuke of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who ignored pleas to lock the barn door while the horse was still inside – that is, to regulate lending while it was booming, rather than after it had already collapsed.

I use the words “unmitigated disaster” advisedly.

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