How do you know when laws are working as intended? When liberals want to rewrite them.
On her MSNBC show Friday night, Rachel Maddow compared the alleged Goldman Sachs fraud to a "mean old man" in "Tiny Town, US" bribing the owner of "Ye Olde Donut Shoppe" to serve his customers chlorine in their coffee instead of non-dairy creamer, because "mean old man" had taken out life insurance policies on the shop's customers.
Here's Maddow and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson talking about the SEC filing suit against Goldman Sachs and GOP opposition to proposed financial overhaul legislation --
MADDOW: Republicans today announced that they are standing in unified opposition to Wall Street reform. We all live in Tiny Town now. Don't use the non-dairy creamer. Joining us now is Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and associate editor for the Washington Post and an MSNBC political analyst. Gene, thank you for bearing with me through that murderous analogy. (laughs)
ROBINSON: It was pretty gruesome and I'm going to be really, really careful the next time I go into Ye Olde Donut Shoppe and have a coffee. Maybe I'll just have, you know, just a nice mineral water. Who knows what that would be.
MADDOW: That was foreshadowing. Like, who wants to go into an Olde Donut Shoppe anyway? (crosstalk) So that was the foreboding music at the beginning.
ROBINSON: That's true, that's true.
MADDOW: All right, so Republicans announced their unified opposition to Wall Street reform on the same day we find out about this Goldman Sachs fraud case. Is this just bad timing? Do they have a special spin here that I don't understand yet? Do you know what's going on?
ROBINSON: No, this is, this is bizarre timing. It, it would seem both on the surface and I think underneath that this is, that this makes no sense, that this is, this is ridiculous timing and I don't think there's really a spin you can put on this. This is not the day when you want to kind of raise your hand and say, yah big banks! Yah Goldman Sachs! Yah mean old man or hedge fund guy. You don't, that's not the side you want to be on and, you know, all these Wall Street deals and transactions are complicated, but this one actually you can explain. You can use the analogy (presumably referring to one cited by Maddow), you can just kind of walk through it. It's, it's understandable and it's so egregious that I can't believe the Republicans aren't going to have to get on board something and in a hurry.
In other words, something, anything, and pronto. After all, "this is not the day," Robinson claims, "to kind of raise your hand and say, yah big banks! Yah Goldman Sachs! Yah mean old man or hedge fund guy."
Then again, if you're a liberal, does the day ever come when you say, yah big banks!? Or, for that matter, yah wealth, yah prosperity!? Yes, but only on days when it can be seized through taxes and siphoned to those who create and produce least. Gimme a Y! Gimme an A! ...
What I'm struck by is the baffling inability of both Maddow and Robinson, two purportedly intelligent people, to comprehend any interpretation other than the one they've latched onto. (Maddow's disdain for rubbing elbows at "Ye Olde Donut Shoppe" - eek! - also stands out).
At risk of stating the obvious, another perspective comes to mind. What the allegations against Goldman Sachs show is that current laws against financial malfeasance work just fine, thank you very much, providing they are enforced. And if the allegations here are borne out, those involved should be punished accordingly and their victims justly compensated.
Regardless of that, Democrats and their cheerleaders at MSNBC aren't inclined to let a crisis go to waste, not when they can use it as pretext for demagoguery against banks while a recession persists and populist resentments against wealth fester.
By clogging the system with more regulations in the guise of reform, Democrats might finally launch a "stimulus" program that actually creates jobs -- for corporate lawyers.
