Rod Dreher: September 2008 Archives

Among some Republicans who admit that Sarah Palin has more or less blown her interviews to this point, there's developing a sense that the McCain people are screwing Palin up by cramming her head full off factoids and talking points. If they just back off and let Palin be Palin, the theory goes, she'll do much better in these interviews.

The problem with this, says Julian Sanchez:

It's a nice enough theory, but where exactly is the evidence for it? Sure, we can look back and find instances where she's handled herself more competently, but her gaffes have not been, as some of her apologists seem to want to imply, a matter of getting flustered by her failure to recall the name of the Brazilian finance minister. Her problem is not mastery of the details: It's fundamental cluelessness about how the economy works, and a demonstrable inability to conceive of foreign policy in anything but the crudest terms.

He goes on to say that Palin's answers so far suggest that she's a dim bulb, or that her ignorance of these important issues is so deep that she's not likely to make up for it by intensive briefings. I think this is true -- and I don't believe for a second that she's dumb. Just profoundly incurious and therefore manipulable.

I ask those who still believe in the Palin candidacy: where's the evidence that there's more to her than what we've seen on these interviews? I'm not asking to be snarky; I really want to know.

I just got an e-mail purporting to come from Citigroup -- it has a Citigroup address -- inviting me to ... well, take a look:

Dear Citibank Customer,

As you may already know, by voting down the proposed $700 billion financial bailout package - and causing a spectacular stock market rout - a majority of members in the House of Representatives made a clear statement that they didn't want to put taxpayers on the hook for the failures of financial institutions.

But there's a catch: taxpayers are already on the hook for the failures of financial institutions, and it's possible that the bill will actually be larger without bailout legislation than with it. That's because the regulators who mind the financial industry - the Federal Reserve, Treasury and FDIC - will keep doing what they've been doing: stepping in to prevent the chaotic failure of banks and other large financial institutions. This means continuing to put hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at risk, but in a way that adheres to no clear plan of action and doesn't require members of Congress to explicitly approve their actions.

Because we value you as our customer and share your concerns about your financial assets, we now offer you the option to have your account moved on our servers abroad. This will prevent any financial loss from your account in case the U.S. financial system collapses. This option is free of charge and you will still have easy and secure access your money in the same way as before.

Please click here and follow the instructions to secure your financial assets by moving your account to our servers located abroad in countries that do not have any connections, strong or weak, to the American financial system.

Also, to better protect you against phishing attacks and prevent identity theft, we will manually verify the provided information. Before filling the form, please have ready a scanned copy of your ID or driving license and a copy of your Citi Card to prove that you are the true owner of the account.

After successfully completing the required steps, your account will be moved on our new servers located abroad. You won't feel any negative impact of account movement and you won't have any problems accessing your money from anywhere in the world.

Sincerely,

Citigroup Financial Security Specialists

Do you get this? Crooks pretending to be Citibank officials are taking advantage of people's fear that they'll lose their money, and trying to convince them to hand over account information. The most vulnerable, ignorant people -- the most frightened -- will be the ones who fall for this, and who will find themselves penniless no matter what happens in Washington or with the markets.

Economics columnist Anatole Kaletsky, in today's Times of London:

In one form or another, the package will surely be passed in the next few days, since the alternative would be the failure of every leading bank in America, the inability of the US Government to honour its guarantees to retail savers and the bankruptcy of many large US corporations, probably including General Motors and Ford. For the rest of the world, particularly for Britain, a definitive collapse of the US bailout would mean nationalisation of all leading banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions - and that unthinkable international impact is another reason why we can be fairly certain that a bailout of some kind will be passed quite soon.

Ross Douthat and Daniel Larison exemplify two plausible conservative reactions to the bailout plan. Larison's idea is that a bailout like this would traduce principles, and that we'd be better off to take the pain we have coming to us rather than give up the things we stand for to buy some temporary comfort. Douthat's idea -- and to be fair to Ross, it's not really an idea he's explicated, but a notion he's floated -- is that as awful as this bailout proposal is, the cost to society in terms of the instability a Great Depression redux would cause to the civic order would be worse.

This is by no means a trivial or even a theoretical point. Most Americans alive today simply have no way to imagine what life in a Depression would be like -- and that the rain, so to speak, would fall on the just and the unjust alike. Back in the Depression, the only way my dad and his family had food to eat some nights was because he and his brother shot squirrels and stewed them. I can remember as a child watching my dad some nights take leftover cornbread from dinner, but it in a tall glass, fill it with milk and eat the mush with a spoon. He told us that during the Depression, many was the night that that was their family's dinner: cornbread mush.

No meat. No vegetables. Just mush. For tens of millions of Americans, that was the 1930s.

I keep going back on forth on whether or not I support the proposed bailout. But I'm thinking a lot these days about my children, and how they would fare if they spent their childhoods in a Depression, as my father did (my mom was born in 1943, so she missed it). I think the lasting damage the Depression did to my dad was the absence of his father, who was away for years, working construction jobs where he could get them, sending money home to feed his family. My grandfather was robbed of much of his two boys' childhoods, because he had no choice but to travel for work. That could happen to me. That could happen to you. Conservatives should ask ourselves whether risking a collapse of the currrent economic and civil order is worth holding fast to principles. Phrased that way, the answer would likely be no, and I don't mean to beg the question. It could be that we've gotten so strung out that only crash therapy can return us to reality. I honestly don't know. I wish the way ahead were clear, and that we had leaders we could trust to get us there.

Remember when Newt Gingrich engineered a shutdown of the federal government because Bill Clinton was mean to him on Air Force One? Remember how well that turned out for Republicans. You can't help but think back to that vanity and stupidity when you hear House Republicans saying that 12 of their number voted "no" on the bailout bill because the reliably obnoxious Nancy Pelosi hurt their feelings. Over at the Corner, Pete Wehner lights into them:

Can they be serious? Do they realize how foolish and irresponsible they sound? On one of the most important votes they will ever cast, insisting "the speech made me do it" is lame and adolescent. The vote, after all, was on the legislation, not the speech. And to say that a dozen members of your caucus voted not out of principle but out of pique is a terrible indictment of them. I hope we learn the names of these delicate figures whose feelings were so bruised and abused.

What unbelievably petty people.

Somehow, this doesn't inspire confidence. As K-Lo puts it, it looks like Palin "went back to the principal's office with her dad.":