How's this for bootstraps, stand on your own feet, personal responsibility teabaggerism?
Tea Party aligned Georgia Rep. Tom Graves (R), who castigates Washington for fiscal irresponsibility, reached an out of court settlement Wednesday after he was sued for defaulting on a $2.2 million loan—which his attorney argued is the bank's fault for lending him the money in the first place.
Graves and his business partner Chip Rogers—who is the state Senate's Republican majority leader—took out a $2.2 million loan from the Bartow County Bank in 2007 to buy and renovate a local motel. The project soon went belly-up.[...]
In June, Simon Bloom, the attorney for Graves and Rogers, argued in a court filing that the default was the bank's fault because it lent the pair the money knowing full well they couldn't pay. Bloom cited a deposition in which bank officials saw Graves and Rogers' financial records, and then had them sign personal guarantees so they'd "'have some skin in the game' presumably meaning a sense of personal obligation for the debts ... even though they clearly could not fulfill the obligation." Graves and Rogers said they were unaware of that particular filing.
Perfect. Not only did Graves not know that he wouldn't be able to ever pay back a $2.2 million loan, he didn't know he had signed a personal guarantee that he would. Really pathetic. But how much do you want to bet that Graves is among those who thinks Fannie and Freddie and all those loans to "undeserving" people who couldn't afford to pay back the loans caused the financial meltdown?
Just because it's fun, and for a little bit of insight into who this guy is, here's Rep. Tom Graves and Lawrence O'Donnell schooling the freshman congressman on what is actually constitutional the time before last when the teabaggers took the nation hostage.