Posted on 05/11/2010 4:32:18 PM PDT by TitansAFC
TARP is, of course, the prime (but certainly not only) reason offered by Bennett’s opponents as to why he had to be torpedoed in Utah. The problem, as Dave Weigel notes: A lot of Republicans voted for TARP and not all of them are notorious RINOs. Why, here’s one now… RN: You’re not facing opposition in South Dakota. How have you finessed this issue — how do Republicans explain why they voted for TARP?
[JOHN] THUNE: There was a tremendous, broad support in South Dakota among the small business community, the financial community, the South Dakota pension funds, the governor — there was a tremendous amount of support at the time for taking the steps that we took. I think a lot of people would dispute or take issue with how it was used. But people felt like, even though many disagreed with it, we took the steps necessary to prevent the economy from a complete meltdown.
I’ve been watching the Bennett thing play out for the past few weeks and can’t figure out how he came to be seen as some sort of McCain/Graham/Frum/Brooks/Kathleen Parker hybrid who had to be purged post haste. I get the political logic of dumping him — the seat is entirely safe so there’s no risk in replacing him with a more conservative novice nominee — but the idea that Bob Bennett, who flew almost completely under the blogosphere’s radar until recently, is some sort of archenemy of the right is strange. Correct me if I’m wrong but what’s really going on here is (a) the grassroots wanted to flex some muscle by beating up an incumbent, (b) Utah’s caucus system gave them their best shot of doing that, and (c) in order to get people motivated, the resident Utah incumbent had to be depicted as the second coming of Nelson Rockefeller or something. Right? Again, it’s no big deal since the seat is safe, but if voting for TARP is a mortal sin, you’d better be prepared to excommunicate some people you like. Exhibit A: Enjoy the following video flashback from the C-SPAN archives. September 29, 2008.
Exit question: Is Bennett going to go the Lieberman route and run as an independent? If he does, he’ll do so without NRSC support. Looks like Cornyn’s finally learned his lesson.
Why do you say she “jerks people around”? She said she was a “common sense conservative”, and when she attacked the “republican establishment” it wasn’t because they weren’t conservative enough, it was because of corruption.
She’s a lifelong republican. She’s a “maverick”, meaning she does her own thing, she doesn’t try to live some ideological litmus test.
I understand why some people want to claim she’s not conservative. But it’s silly to claim she is “jerking people around”. She’s a maverick — that’s what they do, their own thing. She’s made no secret of it.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Dude, When you post here......
Do not smoke crack when you are drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and chewing Nicorette gum.
Your comment is bizarre to say the least. No Constitutional government can survive people like you.
DeMint voted NO.
I have realized that offering reasons and well formed arguments is disorienting and confusing to faux conservatives.
Realize as well that some financial entities such as bear stearna were allowed to fail. There is no conservative history that you can point to that does not violate the abstract values that you keep appealing to.
I have found that even Reagan fails the rino tests of faux conservatives.
Me too. It’s easy to gloat about purity after your butt is saved from chaos.
Hunting witches is a FReeper sport however that is enthusiastically joined from a position of post chaotic safety.
You can come up with any ‘reason’ you want to justify bad behavior, but bad behavior is still bad.
Bailouts are real bad behavior.
For reasons stated it was demostrably good behavior. The abstraction games being played by the purists here are the bad behavior.
This is politics not philosophy.
It is the choosing of lesser evils.
People keep saying that.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
And please explain why some poor wage earner barely keeping home and hearth together has to have money taken out of his paycheck by force to pay for a ‘bailout’ of a company with far more assets than he has. And never even getting a chance to have a say in the matter.
Why?
You can’t preserve the Constitution if your ‘politics’ keep destroying it.
If you supported Tarp you are more than a RINO, you are an idiot also.
It is a fact that there are people who are upset with the idea of ANY TARP. There are even more people upset with the TARP we got.
But people being upset does not in any way prove that it was wrong. People are upset about the Arizona law, but it is a good law.
It’s easy to forget the financial situation our country was in back in 2008. I know I want to forget it, and I missed the biggest days because I had a torn retina.
If only these people have gotten this upset back when the government was implicitly guaranteeing mortgages. The takeover of Freddie and Fannie is going to cost us 10 times what the original TARP cost us, and is solely because of the mistakes made years ago, mistakes that some good republicans tried to correct, but nobody on our side was giving them political backing to do so.
So I refuse to hold the TARP vote against people who otherwise have shown conservative credibility. As votes went, it’s an easy one to rile up the masses about (because to rile up the masses you need something that translates into a simple sound bite).
Do you have any idea what the original purpose of TARP was? If so, you shouldn’t be confused as to what I’m talking about.
There were good assets for which nobody wanted to pay a penny, because nobody had any money because the markets were frozen. We needed an injection of liquidity, and the easiest way to do that without printing money was for the government to “buy” these assets at the reasonable value they would have when money was available.
As it turns out, the government did a good job of this, which is why we are getting paid back with interest on most of those assets, and the “$700 billion”, is now under 100 billion.
Unfortunately, we later took some of the TARP money and used it to buy stupid things that had no value, like two car companies that will never pay us back.
And the real problem is we took over Freddie and Fannie, and they are going to cost us a LOT MORE than TARP ever did.
TARP, as it ended up, was a bad bill, but it had too much that was necessary to make it easy to vote against. TARP gave too much control to the government, and was too open-ended. There are many other problems with TARP.
Much of TARP wasn’t bailouts. It was government stepping in and temporarily buying assets that were unreasonably faltering because of government policies that had frozen the monetary markets.
Many companies have paid back the loans with interest, thus putting the lie to the charge of “bailout”.
Later, Bush used TARP money to bail out companies, and we won’t get that back. TARP had too many loopholes, and too little accountability.
TARP can be easily defined as a TURD.
No matter how you try to pick it up, you cannot find a clean end.
TARP is/was a TURD.
The people have seen right through all those to try to explain otherwise.
That's a fact.
It’s a lot easier to voice platitudes than actually discuss something.
But it’s a shame more people don’t understand the difference between a fact and an opinion. Public school has really let us down.
All true.
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