What Rove and Company has Wrought, Lowering Political Discourse to the Level of Dementia

The Fox Business Journal reports:

As a presidential candidate, Democrat John Edwards has regularly attacked subprime lenders, particularly those that have filed foreclosure suits against victims of Hurricane Katrina. But as an investor, Mr. Edwards has ties to lenders foreclosing on Katrina victims.

The Wall Street Journal has identified 34 New Orleans homes whose owners have faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress Investment Group LLC. Mr. Edwards has about $16 million invested in Fortress funds, according to a campaign aide who confirmed a more general Federal Election Commission report. Mr. Edwards worked for Fortress, a publicly held private-equity fund, from late 2005 through 2006.

Asked about the matter, Mr. Edwards yesterday pledged that he would personally provide financial assistance to New Orleanians who are facing foreclosure by Fortress-affiliated businesses or have lost their homes already. "I intend to help these people," the former North Carolina senator said.

This is were the Republican perversity begins: Edwards' passive investment or rather the investment of a hedge fund in which he's invested is bad. (He is allegedly having the fund in question get him out of the investment in question.) (The perversity was first mainstreamed by Lee Atwater, whose protege Rove was. Rove then amped it up greatly, relying overly on false smears of opposing candidates. Which gets to the real reason that there can never be a true Republican majority: Republican positions are just too alienating. The best the demented radicals can do is eke out enough votes to stay in power. Of course, having the current Supreme Court and Diebold on their side helps where they can't otherwise eke out an electoral win with Rovian tactics. And of course, Big Media helps to a point, maybe; although it "help" has actually resulted in audience loss so who knows if they are really of any help.)

And as the Journal admits up front, this investment is putting fewer than three dozen people at potential risk.

Yet the Journal and the rest of the radical nutjob coterie has no propblem with Dick Cheney directly benefitting from his Haliburton investment.

Nor do the wingnuts have any problem with Our Leaders' "solution" for the sub-prime crisis: Lower an interest rate instead of, oh, ensuring that the sub-prime borrowers can do work-outs and rescheduling of their debts:

No matter that through its open-market operations, the Fed had flooded the money markets so that fed funds traded consistently under the official 5¼% target rate, prompting some observers to conclude that a stealth easing move already had taken place. If so, the easing brought no comfort to those who needed it most, and merely stuffed the pockets of those too timorous to part with any cash.

***

* * Lending to the strapped borrowers through the discount window won't bail out hedge funds and other speculators, as would the much-desired cut in the fed-funds target.

Meanwhile, by reviving the discount-window facility, which had fallen into disuse in recent years, credit would be directed to borrowers who can't get it elsewhere. And those loans would come at a price -- 50 basis points above the funds rate target, against collateral that gets a commensurate haircut.

Link.