Monday, February 8, 2010

Suddenly Sarah Palin Gets Bailout Religion

In September of 2008 Sarah Palin was completely on-board with the idea of the bailout which subsequently came to be known as TARP. She and John McCain were wrong on the one issue which might have swept them into office.

A little more than a year later in her book Going Rogue she still defended the bailout of the banks.

But now, just a few months down the road from the book's release, she's suddenly outraged that the banks have suffered no consequences and that the bailout dam has inexplicably burst forth like a flood, as if she had nothing to do with its inception.

From her Tea Party speech in Nashville:

We can be conquered by bombs, but we can also be conquered by neglect, by ignoring our Constitution and disregarding the principles of limited government. . . .Washington has now replaced private irresponsibility with public irresponsibility. The list of companies and industries that the government is crowding out and bailing out and taking over, it continues to grow.

First, it was the banks, mortgage companies, financial institutions, then automakers. Soon, if they had their way, health care, student loans. Today, in the words of Congressman Paul Ryan, the $700 billion TARP has morphed into crony capitalism at its wors[t]. It is becoming a slush fund for the Treasury Department's favorite big players, just as we had been warned about.

While people on main street look for jobs, people on Wall Street, they're collecting billions and billions in your bailout bonuses. Among the top 17 companies that received your bailout money, 92 percent of the senior officers and directors, they still have their good jobs. And everyday Americans are wondering, where are the consequences for them helping to get us into this worst economic situation since the great depression? Where are the consequences?

Sarah Palin represents nothing so much now as a follower of the Tea Party movement. That's one down. And if a third of the voters are already sympathetic as well, that's only 23 million or so to go to a popular majority.

Good luck with that.