By now, you'd think someone at WaPo would wise up about John Solomon and his tendency to only attack Democrats in his pieces about "corruption." You know, his tendency to target legitimate transactions as being somehow corrupt because they were linked at eighth hand to some dirty person.
Well, he's at it again. After his attempted smear of Edwards over his real estate transactions failed, now Solomon attempts to tie him to actions of his employer, Fortress Investment Group.
We'll deconstruct this garbage below the fold....
Here's the lede:
The hedge fund that employed John Edwards markedly expanded its subprime lending business while he worked there, becoming a major player in the high-risk mortgage sector Edwards has pilloried in his presidential campaign.
Edwards said yesterday that he was unaware of the push by the firm, Fortress Investment Group, into subprime lending and that he wishes he had asked more questions before taking the job. The former senator from North Carolina said he had asked Fortress officials whether it was involved in predatory lending practices before taking the job in 2005 and was assured it was not.
In the first sentence, Solomon is already trying to make Edwards look like a hypocrite. He has no shame, does he?
Oh, but wait, there's more.
Fortress and its partners bought Green Tree in 2003. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April, its holding in Green Tree was as high as $492.4 million at the end of 2005 -- 4 percent of Fortress's holdings at the time.
Last July, Fortress expanded its stake in the industry by buying Texas-based Centex Home Equity, a top-25 subprime lender, for an estimated $540 million. In December, Centex Home Equity, now called Nationstar Mortgage, bought the loan-origination division of Champion Mortgage, bringing another subprime lender into the Fortress portfolio.
In March, Newcastle Investment Corp., a real estate investment trust managed by Fortress, announced that it, too, was moving into the subprime market with the purchase of a $1.7 billion loan portfolio. Also in March, Fortress bought about $4 billion in subprime loans from Fremont General Corp.
Now, there are five transactions listed here by Mr. Solomon. Only one of the five took place while Edwards was with the firm. In 2003, he was running for president. By December of last year, he was running again. Basically, Solomon is attempting to tie Edwards to actions he did not participate in and tar him as a liar when it comes to his advocacy for the poor, advocacy that no other major party candidate has done since Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Solomon's guise here is that a company that Edwards worked for made transactions in a field that Edwards has declared himself against, even though the vast majority of those transactions did not take place during Edwards' tenure there, and three of the five took place after he left to run for president. It's pathetic that this was even allowed in the WaPo.
We've talked a lot about what the media is going to do to our candidates in 2008. All those years of Republican one-party power has clearly prejudiced the Beltway press. The problem is, reality clearly demonstrates it's the Republican party who is thoroughly corrupt. The stenographers that make up the Beltway media have taken it upon themselves to simply invent shit to try and achieve the "balance" that the unbalanced Fox News screams about every night, instead of following the reporter's credo, which is to tell it like it is.
I went to a major university and learned the ins and outs of journalism through classes, writing, and editing the student newspaper. Not once did I come across a credo that told me I should make up things as I go to create a false "balance" to please the people who were in power (and let's remember, they aren't in power anymore). Every time this happens, we need to call them out on it and let them know that we expect better and that we will find people who truly understand the responsibility and public trust they are charged with if they are unable to stop behaving as if this is the Republican monarchy.