Sad to see another hysterical, sarcastic, logic-devoid rant on the Rec List, this one attacking Ben Bernanke, with such gems as "Bernanke or Brownie - what the fuck is the difference?" because Bernanke, worse than Brownie who just let one city drown, is responsible for "letting the entire United States drown, killing hundreds", amongst other crimes.
The diarist starts out with a distorted take on a weekend Fox News interview of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, objecting to Gibbs' use of the word "repercussions":
Excuse me, but what the fuck does that even mean? Let's break it down, shall we? Ok - Gibbs is saying, essentially that if Bernanke is not confirmed there will be: 'repercussions.'
Really? Let's look at the question Gibbs was asked:
Chris Wallace: What does the President think that the repercussions would be on Wall Street and around the world if Bernanke is not reconfirmed?
Robert Gibbs: Well Chris I think that the best way to not have to deal with any of those repercussions is to support Ben Bernanke for a second term.
In his answer, Gibbs avoided detailing any repercussions of not confirming Bernanke! Instead, Robert Gibbs simply repeated a word his questioner used in order to deflect the question, making the inarguably true point that if we confirm Bernanke, any worries that anybody might have about what would happen if we don't confirm Bernanke are irrelevant.
It's what any good press secretary in that spot. He doesn't want to talk about any "repercussions" the President might think could occur if Bernanke is confirmed, because it's a no win situation. If he reveals that the President thinks that repercussions would occur, he would get accused of being a threat-monger by some, but more importantly, he could be proven wrong by future events-- a solid reason for not breaking out the crystal ball too much as a general rule, not just here. If he reveals that the President thinks that no repercussions would occur, then he gives Senators an out to vote against Bernanke-- 'Hey, even the President said that nothing bad would happen if we voted NO on Bernanke!'
But from this, the diarist somehow gets a "veiled threat", interpreting Gibbs as saying: "If we don't vote for Bernanke, Wall Street might, you know..... blow up." The diarist even goes through the contorted process of going thru the thesaurus on the word 'repercussions' in order to find even more scary words like 'reverberations'-- as if 'repercussions' were a word carefully chosen for effect by Gibbs, when in fact it was a word not chosen by Gibbs at all, but by his interviewer.
What a joke that such nonsense gets hundreds of recommends on a site that purports itself to be a "reality-based community".
The diarist then quotes four long paragraphs of an anti-Bernanke screed by the author of the blog where he pulled the video. I would note that the author of that blog has a new, equally hysterical post up called Why Markets Have Technical Targets Near Zero. In it, the author talks of such things as "head and shoulders patterns" in the charts of major global stock market indices that indicate that they "target, effectively, zero". If you can't identify that blogger as a raving lunatic from his anti-Bernanke polemic, perhaps you can from his latest post.
More worthy analysis of Ben Bernanke's record come from other places-- such as from Paul Krugman, who in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse, had this to say about Bernanke:
I believe we’ve been lucky to have Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman during these trying times...
Mr. Bernanke recognized, more quickly than others might have, that we were in a situation bearing a family resemblance to the great banking crisis of 1930-31. His first priority, overriding every other concern, had to be preventing a cascade of financial failures that would cripple the economy.
...
Because the institutions in trouble weren’t called banks, the Fed’s usual tools for dealing with financial trouble, designed for a system centered on traditional banks, were largely useless. So the Fed has cobbled together makeshift arrangements to save the day. There was the TAF and the TSLF (don’t ask), there were credit lines to investment banks, and the whole thing culminated in March’s unprecedented, barely legal Bear Stearns rescue -- a rescue not of Bear itself, but of its "counterparties," those who were on the other side of its financial bets.
It’s still far from certain whether all this improvisation has resolved the crisis. But it was the right thing to do, and for the moment things seem to be calming down.
Paul Krugman, 5/5/2008
Krugman correctly appreciated the Bear Stearns bailout. He endorsed the concept of bailing out an institution not to save itself, but to rescue its counterparties, even despite the fact that it was, as he says, "barely legal" to do so (does this sound like AIG to anyone?). It was "the right thing to do" these barely legal things on behalf of parties that probably didn't deserve to be bailed out, because the alternative was to pursue the disastrous course of action that had been pursued before by Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover at the start of the Great Depression-- a course that Bernanke, as a scholar of the Great Depression, is familiar with as few others are.
Unlike Brownie-- the incompetent crony who was put into a post way over his head and who froze when a crisis hit-- Ben Bernanke, this mild-mannered Ivy league academic with a 1590 SAT score has been a courageous leader, willing to take strong and decisive action in troubled times. He's smart, he's honest, and he now has a wealth of experience unmatched by anyone else who could possibly replace him. We can pore over his past statements and find instances where he has been mistaken in his judgments, or we can admit that it it true what Krugman said: we've been lucky to have him in this crisis.
In my opinion, he should be reconfimed.