Via Paul Campos over at LGM, evidently Sen. McCain went on CNBC’s Squawk Box and on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning and called for a “9/11 commission type thing” to ”find out what went wrong and to fix what’s going to happen in the future so this never happens again.”
Now, I don’t know that Sen. McCain’s idea of a special commission is anything but a stupid idea to start with. I mean, if he means anything by a 9/11 commission type thing, he means a congressionally legislated bipartisan commission of former office-holders who are not currently legislators or governors. Why on earth would the credit crisis benefit from that, rather than from any of the currently established organizations—the SEC, the House and Senate Committees that cover banking, the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury, and the Fed—who have actual power to make actual changes in the laws and regulations that govern the industry.
Unless what Sen. McCain means by a 9/11 type commission is that he wants a slow, useless commission whose recommendations can be easily ignored. Oh, yes, of course that’s what he means. So: when Sen. McCain says that he wants a 9/11 commission type thing, the obvious follow up question is do you mean you don’t think the FED, the House and Senate, the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury and the SEC should act?
And the next follow-up question is whether Sen. McCain really thinks the credit crisis is as bad as 9/11. I mean, YHB thinks it is; undoubtedly more people have already died because of the credit crisis than died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the remaining crisis has the power to do far more damage than a handful of ragged terrorists in caves halfway across the globe. I thought my point of view was wildly outside the mainstream, though, that I was (as usual) a raving left-wing blogger. Has Sen. McCain joined me over there? Or, perhaps, is he just throwing 9/11s into his sentences without referent of any kind, as if the sound of it would go straight to voter’s hindbrains?
You know, I might possibly have preferred the claim that Sen. McCain invented the Blackberry.
By the way, Sen. McCain—the joint between the two long parts of your arm, the package holder that lets you touch your finger to your nose, that’s your elbow. Your ass is the other thing.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
hee hee hee. maybe he wants us all to know that he thinks the government is powerless to solve the problems private enterprise has already failed at doing, you know, so’s to bolster consumer confidence.