Thursday, April 22, 2010

Inhofe is right???????? About anything??

It appears so:
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said that his fellow GOP senators who voted to pass the $700 billion bailout program in the fall or 2008 run a political risk now, when the Senate has moved onto financial reform legislation.

"Republicans have a problem on this," Inhofe said during an appearance on WLS radio in Chicago. "As you know, I was leading the opposition in October of '08 to the $700 billion bailout. And the Republicans, most of them caved in, and all the Democrats did."

"And so I was cautioning them on this: don't try to paint this so much as the Wall Street bailout as it is, whatever they come up with, because we are vulnerable," Inhofe explained of that bailout. "I'm not personally, because I opposed it, but most of -- almost all the Republicans went along with it."
It's pretty insane that Inhofe is the one who is acting like the Republican voice of reason here. That says a lot in and of itself. What's more amazing is that he's actually putting a pin to the epistemic closure bubble that the right has meticulously constructed around this issue. He's correct that the bulk of the GOP caucus wound up supporting TARP back in the day, but the new Republican narrative is that the GOP is the Enemy of the Bailouts, that they were never necessary and that Bush Obama wasted taxpayer dollars on them, etc.

My guess is that the right will ignore Inhofe easily enough, despite the fact that the usually insane old buzzard has made an excellent point.

The Man, The Myth, The Bio

East Bay, California, United States
Problem: I have lots of opinions on politics and culture that I need to vent. If I do not do this I will wind up muttering to myself, and that's only like one or two steps away from being a hobo. Solution: I write two blogs. A political blog that has some evident sympathies (pro-Obama, mostly liberal though I dissent on some issues, like guns and trade) and a culture blog that does, well, cultural essays in a more long-form manner. My particular thing is taking overrated things (movies, mostly, but other things too) down a peg and putting underrated things up a peg. I'm sort of the court of last resort, and I tend to focus on more obscure cultural phenomena.