Cleaving To Wall Street

Let's give the Republican Party some credit. Let's assume its sincerity. By that standard, Senator Orrin Hatch is only partially paranoid. Daily Kos reported Tuesday that the Utah Republican

seemed to imply on Fox News today that the administration may have pushed for a civil suit against Goldman Sachs to be filed at a time that benefited Democrats' financial reform push, saying that "the timing is very suspect."

"This whole Goldman Sachs thing, isn't that a little odd that all of a sudden, right at the height of this legislative period, we suddenly have the SEC filing suit against Goldman Sachs?" Hatch asked.

"I think the timing is very suspect," he said.

He continued:

There's something terribly wrong here and I don't know what it is, but to do that right at this particular time, you know, the timing is very suspect in my eyes.

If that seems a little paranoid, though, it's nothing compared to the conspiracy Rush Limbaugh uncovered today:

The regime is denying any conspiracy between themselves and the SEC and Goldman Sachs over an effort to get this financial regulatory reform bill passed with Honest Obe heading to the Cooper Union Thursday in New York to make the first big pitch.

So now President Obama and the Securities and Exchange Commission and Goldman Sachs are in it together! Therefore, you might conclude, Rush is in favor of reform of the financial industry. You would be thinking logically, but would be wrong:

Folks, let's go back to the premise of this whole financial regulatory reform bill. The whole premise of this is that is based on the fact that Wall Street's to blame for the financial meltdown, and it's not. Government is to blame for the meltdown....

"Whoa, what happened there? Why, how did those people on Wall Street pull the wool over our eyes on this one? These thieves! We gotta go in there and regulate these people. Why, look! You can't trust the private sector at all. Private sector always screws you." That's why we're here. The whole thing, the whole Dodd bill for financial regulatory reform is bogus. The only reform that's need is a reformation of government, a reformation of the Congress, a reformation of what's going on at the White House. I mean, even without getting into any other specifics, the whole premise of this is wrong. A lot of us are, frankly, fed up. Every time the government makes a mistake, which is frequently, they sit back and turn it around and blame it on the private sector, which is the golden goose of this country, and they exonerate themselves!

This really is genius- no, really. The President, dictator that he is, controls the SEC; Obama decides to persecute Goldman Sachs, which is in on the conspiracy; Wall Street, however, is blameless because government, which is conspiring with Goldman Sachs, is completely to blame. This particular firm, which has a connection with Robert Rubin and other powerful Democrats, is thus demonized- and so is Barack Obama and the federal government. But no regulation of Wall Street, on which Goldman Sachs is a prime player, can ever be justified.

It may not make sense, but as a way of ginning up hostility to financial regulation and not appearing to be supportive of a mega-corporation under a criminal cloud, it is even more brilliant than Senator Hatch's more pedestrian fantasy.