A recent diary here has asked us to be smarter than the Freepers. However, being smarter does not necessarily mean being more honest. A lot of the Wall Street investment bankers thought of themselves as pretty smart people. Smart has unfortunately taken on the connotation of being able to pull something over on other people. We don't need any more smart people like that. What we really need are more honest people, even if being honest means admitting to some pretty painful truths.
I think in our urgency to defend the Obama administration, we are behaving like a bunch of Philadelphia lawyers seeking the flimsiest shred of evidence on which to get our client off the hook, guilty or not. We need to instead encourage honesty and openness in government, one of the things Obama promised during his campaign. People just want plain, honest talk about what is happening. They want assurance that their interests are being guarded in Washington by people of integrity.
At issue in the afore-mentioned diary was an interview of William Black conducted by Bill Moyers. The argument was made that Black's accusations were wrong because he misinterpreted the Prompt Corrective Action Law and overstated the authority of the FDIC. But Black also made allegations of fraud, cover-up, and the possible conflict of interest and dishonesty on the part of Tim Geithner, a man in whom this administration, and by extension the public, has placed an awful lot of trust and responsibility. Someone has to address these allegations.
Now we can get bogged down on just what the FDIC can or cannot do or we can call upon the Obama administration for answers to the questions raised in this interview. We are entitled to an explanation at the very least and corrective action if necessary. It should not be our mission to find a plausible defense for a single action at the expense of demanding answers for any and all actions taken by this administration. Let us not become like the freepers, willing to find any excuse, however pretentious, to condone any action taken by the people we have supported and elected. If anything, let us be more demanding and so set an example of what good citizenship and party loyalty require. Let us be the change we were looking for when we elected this new government.
In an update to his column on the matter, Glenn Greenwald adds:
UPDATE: Just to get a sense for how propagandistic, sycophantic and fact-free are the most extreme Obama worshippers in our "journalist" class, consider this recent article from The New Republic's Noam Scheiber in which he urged the White House to "free its economic oracle" -- Summers -- and defended and praised Summers on the ground that "his exposure to Wall Street over the years has been limited." As Jonathan Schwarz asks, citing the massive compensation on which Summers engorged himself by feeding at the Wall Street trough last year: "I wonder what would have constituted 'significant' exposure to Wall Street? Maybe if he'd worked for D.E. Shaw full time? (Amazingly, Summers was paid $5.2 million for a part-time position.)"