I hope Illinois is suitably ashamed for ever electing this joker in the first place. Here's Congessman (sigh) Joe Walsh (R-IL), getting so pissed off that someone would question our Galtian overlords that he has a full-blown public meltdown. Partial transcript via
Think Progress:
WALSH: Thats not the problem! The problem is you’ve got to be consistent. And I dont want government meddling in the marketplace. Yeah, they move from Goldman Sachs to the White House, I understand all of that. But you gotta’ be consistent. And it’s not the private marketplace that created this mess. What created mess was your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home. And we’ve made it easy as possible for people to be in homes. [...] Don’t blame banks, and don’t blame the marketplace for the mess we’re in right now! I am tired of hearing that crap! This pisses me off! Too many people don’t listen. [...]
He then threatened to throw the constituent out rather than listen to any more of that hurtful anti-bank stuff.
All right, so to "deadbeat dad" add "apparently unstable or drunk or something." Who knew? Maybe "mortgage-backed securities" is his trigger word?
Now, it's a bit interesting that when in full, emotional meltdown, when people usually are at their most unfiltered, Walsh is indeed apparently convinced that the entire reason our economy melted down is because people were assholes enough to want to live in homes. How dare they! And how dare government help them! People should live on the damn streets and in the parks, like God intended, and like any good Republican knows!
No, it wasn't because of a ridiculous derivatives market that insulated lenders from bad business decisions, eventually resulting in lenders writing bucketfuls of known-bad loans because they knew they would get paid handsomely no matter what. No, it wasn't because Wall Street, in their obsession to invent yet another way to make imaginary money based on other people's imaginary money, completely forgot that they were all scamming each other by dropping hugely risky assets on each other as if they were the bestest stuff ever. No, it's the damn public for wanting to live in homes.
How the hell does any of that translate into "it's not the private marketplace that created this mess?" What the hell? It was very explicitly the "private marketplace" that did all those things. Oh, heavens, we can't blame the goddamn banks for making piss-poor business decisions—but we can blame regular citizens for not being able to find jobs. We can blame folks for not recognizing that the predatory 50-year balloon-payment triple-salchow inverse heimlich mortgage they were sold was, in fact, a scam that they would never be able to actually pay off. We can blame some random constituent for bringing any of it up.
And that's why we bail out Wall Street to the tune of heaven knows how much, at this point, while austerity-crapping our way to reducing Food Stamps and unemployment benefits so that the poor peons on the street don't get too comfortable with their no-job-having, living-in-their-car luxury living.
In a move that would make more sense if Walsh was a five-year-old, Joe now says he was "working on an empty stomach and had a quicker fuse than normal." Full tummy or not, though, Walsh seems increasingly edgy lately. First he's telling his GOP primary opponent that he'll "punch him in the face, figuratively speaking," now he's having public meltdowns in front of people who are, ostensibly, on his own side.
I think this fellow is losing his marbles. You know, "figuratively speaking."
For more discussion, see the diary by MinistryOfTruth.