0903.25
00:12:00
Impeach Bush Bachmann
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I can’t watch more than a few seconds of this buffoon at one time. I am so sick and tired of these absolute idiots that sit up in these hearings and lambast competent people by asking asinine questions that anybody with even the briefest familiarity with the the way that state power is delegated and conferred in the United States would already know. But no, this ditz thinks she needs to excoriate that intellect, Ben Bernanke, (who, by the way, is a bronze god) by asking him questions that sound like they’re from either a fifth grader or some Ron-Paul tin-foil-hat basket case.
5 Comments
GMT-0500 06:40:43 0903.25 (Wed)
When she did the glasses-pull — that’s when I knew she was serious!
GMT-0500 06:41:56 0903.25 (Wed)
She just referred to a country called Ka-ZAK-istan.
GMT-0500 06:43:32 0903.25 (Wed)
I love the guy shaking his head in disbelief behind Bernanke around 4:01
GMT-0500 11:19:09 0903.29 (Sun)
I dunno. O_o I watched the whole video straight. I don’t see what’s so infuriating about her (in particular, i.e. as compared with most Representatives period, she seems to be par for the course). I think that that our bennyfactor respects Ben Bernanke to such a great degree that any perceived attack on his programs is seen as especially “asinine” compared with most of the idiotic questions posed in congressional hearings such as this. But to me, it’s no more nor less asinine than any of the other questions typically asked.
Here you have a politician who has read the winds back home and in the nation as a whole. She and her aides have observed that (as was already popular during GWB’s presidency) the public tends to look to the Constitution for executive, legislative, and judicial breaches of authority. The public does so because (a) it has been told that the Constitution is “the highest law in the land” while (b) it lacks the time, patience, intelligence, and/or resources to further investigate the more specific letters of the law.
The public is quick to turn a blind eye to the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”) because it requires them to do their legal homework. They don’t have Cliff’s Notes on hand. They don’t know which powers have been expressly forbidden to the states (either at the inception of the country or, with a three-fourths vote, at later times in U.S. history) nor do they appreciate the fact that most of the powers delegated to the U.S. federal government of the 21st Century were either specific extensions of general permissions laid forth in the original Constitution or else were newly-delegated powers which the states consigned to give it [the Federal government]. Insofar as one wishes to argue that any powers not specifically stated in the Constitution or the Amendments as being within the Federal government’s reach are prohibited to it, okay, but it’s not going to accomplish anything except shift a great body of legal literature from one location (whose name I don’t even know myself) to another location: the Amendments. The reason we save only the biggest changes for Amendments is because if we didn’t then the list of Amendments to the Constitution would grow painfully long. I don’t think the general public appreciates this, and I think the congresswoman from Minnesota is capitalizing on this to cement her position as a gunslinger in D.C.
Is she wasting the session’s time? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that her questions are a waste of time, but No in the sense that the entire hearing is one big waste of time.
Do you know what I think is asinine? I think it’s asinine to hold a congressional hearing for these men whom we appointed our elected (or else they, the Congress did!) and to demand of them either (a) information which is being kept secret for the sake of the solution (vide Bernanke’s excellent point at around the 5-minute mark) or (b) general outlines of “the plan” (vide everything she pseudo-asked Geithner).
In conclusion, yeah, she is frustrating, Bennyfactor, but (a) not so much that I couldn’t watch the video in one sitting, and (b) she’s no more frustrating than is the entire House of Representatives.
GMT-0500 11:35:29 0903.29 (Sun)
Here’s a fun medical comparison for Our Bennyfactor to use when discussing Ben Bernanke’s reply with critics (though I don’t know if he does or if he hasn’t already considered this comparison):
Let us say that there are 10 prospective applicants for the job position of U.S. men’s Olympic gymnast. Let us say that, speaking from a strictly “by their performance at tryouts” perspective, we determine the ranking, and here we have our champion, who we’ll call #1. Number One is HIV+. He got the virus from an unknown sexual encounter approximately 2 years ago. He does not have full-blown AIDS. He is being treated with a three-drugs cocktail in order to try and prevent him from developing AIDS. He has to take these medications once every four hours, no exceptions. Because of this, he no longer can get 8 solid hours of sleep a night, and he cannot partake in the typical “bonding time” training camp stuff that most gymnastic teams go through. His potential teammates might even think of him that he is a bit of a loner, vanishing at odd times. They don’t know that he’s vanishing to take his meds.
Now, Mr. Bernanke’s excellent point was this: yes, the paranoid conspiracy theorist could point to #1 and say, “He’s doping!!!!!”, and true, a doper might seem to follow a similar pattern as our #1. But when the medical doctor tells you, “No,” you listen! Or are you going to then extend your conspiracy theory onto the physician as well? “Don’t trust the doc! He’s in on it! He’s been bought off! SEARCH THE RECORDS! WE DEMAND EVIDENCE!”
The Olympic gymnastics team’s doctor knows that there is a stigma surrounding HIV+ patients. Teammates will become cautious around them and not bond properly. Coaches will, whether they want to or not, perceive the athlete as “weaker” than the other athletes, or “a ticking time bomb, ready to explode at any moment.” It is human nature to turn a blind eye to all of the gold medals, all of the muscle tone, all of the world records the athlete has and continues to get and to instead key in on his HIV+ status and ask one’s self, “When is it all going to come to an end? And when it does, will I be there?” They don’t want to be there: they want off the boat before the boat sinks. In other words, a coach with an HIV+ Olympian is likely to ask that Olympian to retire.
It’s the exact same thing with these banks. Yes, as Mr. Bernanke concedes to the congresswoman from Minnesota, the behavior does seem suspicious. “But,” he says (paraphrased), “you just have to trust me. What’s really going on is, we have some pretty major players in banking who are coming to us for money because they need to in order to perform optimally. All banks do. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And yet, banks are ashamed of it, and investors are scared by it. Investors will pull out of a bank overnight if they discover it’s coming to the Fed seeking aid, because they see it as a sign of weakness. Paradoxically, then, banks don’t come to us out of fear of losing their investors, only to end up floundering anyway because they don’t have the funds they need to weather the storm. If only they had come to us!, we asked ourselves. This is why we came up with this plan. It may seem like it’s illicit secret insider trading to you, but you’ve got to trust me. I’m the Federal Reserve Chairman, madam. Please, trust me.”
Like the Olympic physician whom the media wrongly accuses of being in on a doping conspiracy with a suspicious gymnast when he refuses to release the patient’s medical records, so too is Ben Bernanke being accused of being just another corrupt Wall Street official when, while that may be true, it may also not be true and very probably is not true.