Libertarian Leanings

The Schumer Shuffle

All too typical of progressive politics:

But with Mr. Schumer, who voted to inflict this burden on an economy still struggling with high unemployment and slow growth, this is an all-too familiar pattern of behavior that can be summarized as follows:

Step One: Vote for destructive law.

Step Two: Complain about said law, while doing nothing to repeal it.

Step Three: Raise campaign money by showing to business community the volume of said complaints.

...

There's a word for people who keep falling for this: suckers.

It's about time - but will there be payback?

The threat to the American business climate posed by a Democratic sweep in this year's election has finally aroused survival instincts in U.S. Chamber of Commerce members.  So writes Kimberly Strassel.  The organization has historically been non-partisan, but with so much at stake this year it has finally joined the fight with its own ad campaign.

It also unveiled the season's most humorous ad, entitled "Meet Bill." It features real-life union boss, Bill, caught assaulting a cameraman ("I'm gonna' take this camera and stick it somewhere you don't want it!"). It points out that it would be Bill who, under card check, would get to monitor votes in a union drive.

This is brave stuff, especially given Democratic admiration for Bill-like tactics. Chuck Schumer, who is leading the Senate effort to turn Democrats into masters of the universe, is livid. All the more so, given he's spent the past year threatening the business community with dire retribution if it doesn't support his party. (Weren't they listening?) He recently ripped the group as nothing more than a "wing" of the GOP, and has made clear he'll remember the slights.

Apparently the Chamber's historically non-partisan stance is maintained in hopes of avoiding the kind of political retribution Senator Schumer is said to have threatened.  Could it be that their their fears were well founded? 

An important angle in the IndyMac failure that may get lost in ominous headlines tonight and tomorrow: federal regulators pointedly cited U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., in explaining the bank's failure. In simple language, federal regulators blamed Schumer for a run on the bank.

Here's from the press release issued by IndyMac's regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision: "The OTS has determined that the current institution, IndyMac Bank, is unlikely to be able to meet continued depositors’ demands in the normal course of business and is therefore in an unsafe and unsound condition. The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York. The letter expressed concerns about IndyMac’s viability. In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts."

Was it payback the led to the release of Schumer's letter of alarm?  Who at IndyMac might have gotten on the wrong side of Senator Chuck?  (Boldface in the original above, and the link doesn't work.)

"Fire!" he explained.

I think it was deliberate. 

With friends in high media places Democrats have grown accustomed to creating a reality to fit their political ambitions.  To find examples we need only peruse comments of the Democratic leadership over the past several years regarding the war in Iraq.  The war was lost, according to Democrats, and the mainstream press piled on too, publishing every negative story about the war in Iraq but somehow ignoring signs of success.  And there were plenty.  The result should come as no surprise.  A majority of Americans believed until very recently that the war was lost. 

Another black mark against Republican stewardship.  George Bush, the incompetent, led us to defeat in Iraq at the hands of al Qaeda.  Unfortunately for Democrats, it's al Qaeda who is suffering a catastrophic defeat in Iraq, and even their media allies can't avoid it any more.  This does not bode well for Barack Obama, whose campaign strategy is based on his premise that America is losing, and his promise to mitigate the loss with a pullout -- regardless of the conditions on the ground.  But now Americans are slowly coming around to the reality that Iraq is going to be a viable democracy.  While Nouri al Maliki takes on the Shi'ite militias, Barack Obama is busily refining his position on Iraq so as not to be recognized as the threat to Iraq's future that he and the Democrats have always been.

As a campaign issue for Democrats, Iraq is coming up a loser. Time for a new tactic.  It's the economy, stupid.  Enter Chuck Schumer to help out by pushing a faltering IndyMac Bank over the edge in the midst of a credit crunch.  It was easy.  He just leaked a letter he had written to bank regulators who were looking into its troubles.

He was, he says, just doing his job in telling regulators that the bank "could face a collapse," a prophecy that quickly proved to be self-fulfilling. "It's what legislators are supposed to do," the New York Democrat told the Journal. Depositors who spent Monday trying to recover some of their money might beg to differ.

The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), whose job it actually was to regulate IndyMac, took a different view. "The immediate cause of the closing," the OTS wrote in a press release, "was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York." The OTS added: "In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts."

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the Senator knew exactly what he was doing.  Just as anti-war Democrats planned that self-fulfilling prophecies of defeat in Iraq would carry them to electoral victory, Schumer intended to ratchet up the credit crunch with a self fulfilling prophecy of his own.  Democratic candidates might then have a campaign issue that they could blame on Bush Administration mismanagement, now that Iraq is becoming a Democratic liability. 

They'll need a new issue.  By the time October rolls around, it's likely that conditions in Iraq will have made obvious just how duplicitous and wrong the Democratic leadership has been.  It's not for nothing that public approval of congress is lower than at any time in history.  They might try blaming high gas prices on the Republicans but their continuing refusal to permit any boost in U.S. domestic oil production will make that an unlikely proposition.  What's left? 

No doubt Senator Charles Schumer thought he had an issue Democrats could take to the bank.

Schumer says OK on Mukasey

The oily Chuck Schumer said he will vote for the confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey.

Mr. Schumer's announcement followed a private meeting today with Judge Mukasey to discuss waterboarding.

"I deeply oppose it," Mr. Schumer said of waterboarding. "Unfortunately, this nominee, indeed any proposed by President Bush, will not agree with this. I am, however, confident that this nominee would enforce a law that bans waterboarding."

Mr. Schumer, who was Judge Mukasey's chief Democratic sponsor, said the retired judge told him that if Congress passes a law banning waterboarding "the president would have absolutely no legal authority to ignore such a law." Mr. Schumer said Judge Mukasey said he would enforce any congressional ban the controversial interrogation method.

Safe all around.  Schumer can rest assured that Judge Mukasey will not fail to enforce any ban congress chooses to pass on waterboarding.  At the same time Judge Mukasey can be absolutely certain there will be no such ban to enforce.  Twice congress has been given the opportunity to pass such a ban, and twice congress decided against.  Apparently waterboarding is OK with them, while interestingly enough, it's not OK for it to be OK with anybody else, even when it's really not OK with anybody else.  It all makes perfect sense when you think about it.

The Fallujans do not agree

Chuck Schumer, Senate Democrat from New York, recently claimed that violence in Iraq's Anbar province has gone down in spite of the surge, not because it.

The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al-Qaida said to these tribes, 'We have to fight al-Qaida ourselves.' It wasn't that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.

That's not what they say in Fallujah.

...the opinion of a Fallujan interpreter, on the change that empowered the local police to improve the security situation:

"I think, what made (the) change, (is) the American support, the USA support to the IPs (Iraqi Police) and ... support to all the western region, and that's what's different from now and then."

The desperation of these Democrats would be comical if it weren't for the potential of it to produce tragic a outcome.