Frank Rich slams Gary Cohn in NY Mag, Cohn fires back in Bloomberg

Frank Rich on the 5th, here:

The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. ... But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Gary Cohn here on the 6th:

In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull. ... In Washington nothing’s perfect, so I’m not thinking it’s perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. But the fact that we got something really important done, which is corporate tax reform, which made us competitive with the rest of the world, is good.

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

The gay Frank Bruni knows a thing or two about uncontrollable compulsions, projecting his own onto Anthony Weiner and Donald Trump

This is rich, and no, not Frank Rich: "Weiner and Trump, Partners in Compulsion".

"[B]oth men are creatures of potent want and pure compulsion who lucked into forgiving audiences. Weiner’s finally stopped forgiving: Huma Abedin announced that she was formally separating from him after six years of marriage. Trump still has legions by his side. But for how long? ... Weiner sent strangers pictures of his bulge. Trump assured the viewers of a nationally televised debate that he was amply endowed. These impulses — these boasts — aren’t unrelated. ... insecure exhibitionists out for affirmation above all else?"

Ulterior Motives In Writing: Why Does Mark Judge Hate Monica Crowley?

Did you ever get the feeling that an entire column was merely a pretext to slam someone the writer didn't like . . . with a sucker punch saved for the very end?

That's the overwhelming feeling I got from reading Mark Judge's "HL Mencken Against The Journalists" here, which ends with this:

"So let's just put an end to it. Call them analysts. Call them pundits. But to coo over people like Frank Rich and Monica Crowley as brilliant intellectuals is to denude the term of meaning."

After ridiculing liberal after liberal in the column the lazy writer realizes at the end he needs to be an equal opportunity critic and throws poor old Monica under the bus just to make himself look objective.

If Mark Judge hangs around people who coo over anyone, let alone journalists, he's clearly in special company already. They used to call them asylums.

You know, the sort of place which makes you write like this: "but as a man with whom we could speak with about any topic".

The Left's Anti-American Slander

When leftists and socialists compare Americans who believe in limited government to Nazis, they forget that many of them had fathers who left wives and children behind to join in the effort to defeat Hitler. To such Americans, the comparison is an outrage, and the left would do well not to underestimate the consequences of stoking this anger. The following appeared here:

March 31, 2010

The Hostility Follies

By Jonah Goldberg

Apparently there's a self-proclaimed militia leader named Mike Vanderboegh who runs an obscure, low-traffic blog out of Pinson, Ala. (population 5,007). Mr. Vanderboegh recently called on his fellow "sons of liberty" to break the windows of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform.

So let's start with the obvious: Vanderboegh is an idiot, and anyone who followed his advice is an idiot too. These people are buffoons, not just because such tactics help Democrats but because such behavior is simply wrong, reprehensible and clownish.

Equally wrong, reprehensible and clownish: The reaction to Vanderboegh and his alleged ilk.

The Daily Beast's John Avlon insists that Vanderboegh's rallying cry, combined with some threats and broken windows, make "the parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis' heinous 1938 Kristallnacht . . . hard to ignore."

Actually, it's really, really easy to ignore the parallels. During Kristallnacht, Nazi goons destroyed not just 7,000 store windows but hundreds of synagogues and thousands of homes. Tens of thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps by the Nazis, who had been in total power for half a decade.

This combination of state power and murderous, genocidal intent is nowhere on display in America today, not in the Obama administration (contrary to what some overheated right-wingers claim) and certainly not among out-of-power conservatives and "tea partyers." It's amazing anyone needs to point this out, but a few libertarians throwing bricks is not the same thing as the tightening fist of the Third Reich. Indeed, it's an anti-American slander to suggest anything like it is going on here, and it cheapens the moral horror of the Holocaust.

Don't tell that to the Democrats and their media transmission belt, who largely turned a blind eye to partisan vandalism and extremist rhetoric against Republicans for eight years but now express horror at what they claim to hear from the right.

Columnist Paul Krugman, who encouraged liberals to hang Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in effigy, is concerned about right-wing "eliminationist rhetoric." The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy can't stand the incivility of the tea partyers, which is why he wants to "knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads." Frank Rich says the mantra "take our country back" is now code for a white racist backlash -- though it was an apparently fine Democratic applause line when George W. Bush was president.

So what's the evidence for this new reign of terror? Those broken windows, some nasty voice and e-mail messages (not counting those aimed at Republicans, naturally), a coffin "left" at a Missouri congressman's home, a few repugnant signs at rallies and allegations from Reps. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.)and John Lewis (D-Ga.) that they were spit on and insulted with the "N-word," respectively.

But wait. The coffin was part of a protest over the death of "our freedoms" and was toted by the protesters, not left anywhere. And videos make it clear that what Cleaver called spitting was a protester spraying too much saliva while talking, the racist pig.

As for the epithet aimed at Lewis, if it happened, it's disgusting. But going by the video, there's nothing to back it up, and Rep. Andre Carson's (D-Ind.) claim that the N-word was chanted 15 times is pure dishonesty.

Let's assume it is true. I thought liberals rejected guilt by association as McCarthyism. Or are we to believe that every opponent of Obamacare is a racist?

On March 3, Politico broke a story about a leaked PowerPoint presentation delivered at a GOP retreat in Florida. It laid out, in cartoonish terms, a fundraising strategy exploiting "fear" of President Obama's "socialist" agenda. Ranking Republicans condemned and repudiated it.

Now, Obama's political arm, Organizing for America, is fundraising based on fear, sending out e-mails insinuating that Republicans are unleashing a lynch mob to repeal Obamacare. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democrats' Congressional Campaign Committee, insists we all should be very scared.

Heaven forbid anyone suggest a coordinated strategy is at work here. That would be distracting us from the Kristallnacht unfolding before our eyes.