Mr. Moderate

According to this article on the CNN web site, Rush Limbaugh spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, where he continued to display his deliberate confusion over the founding documents of our government. According to that CNN article, Rush said this:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom — and the pursuit of happiness.

For the record, here is the actual preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Rush was confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, whose text includes the words Rush attributes to the Constitution:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Continue reading ‘Rush Limbaugh Is STILL A Big Fat Idiot!’ »

Oliver Stone’s masterpiece movie, Wall Street, seems an appropriate centerpiece for the meltdown in global finance we are currently working our way through. We got to this point of near-total market collapse because the real Wall Street didn’t learn a single thing from the morality play produced by Stone. In spite of being one of the classic seven deadly sins, greed is still the centerpiece of Wall Street morality. In other words, the real Wall Street still plays according to the famous quote from Michael Douglas in the movie, Wall Street, where he says:

greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

To say that the people who inhabit the real Wall Street ought to know better is to understate the obvious. But when you are playing with Other People’s Money (OPM), you are divorced from the risks, and yet you get to reap a substantial portion of the reward. The ultimate in OPM is, of course, federal bailout dollars. And as I write this short piece, our government is going through the motions of agreeing on just how many more federal bailout dollars will be made available to the rich dealmakers on Wall Street so that they will go back to making deals which seem to drive all that is left of the US economy these days.

Should the federal government be taking taxpayer dollars and putting them down on the table at the new Wall Street Casino? Given the reaction to the proposals of the Bush Administration to privatize the Social Security System, I would expect that the vast bulk of US citizens would vote “NO!” But of course, it is our alleged representatives, who get huge quantities of cash from the greedy inhabitants of the real Wall Street, who will actually vote to approve this ghastly mess. Is there much doubt that Congress will go along with this requested bail-out? Probably not, but one can hold out hope for at least a little while.