It has taken a few days, but a new great wall of Obama apologetics has been laboriously constructed at the great orange fortress of wishful thinking called DKos. Let us bask in the freedom of Democratic incorrectness that Docudharma provides to summarize the official apologetics. Here they are in Q&A form:
Q: Why did Obama appoint Summers and Geithner, men deeply implicated in the undermining of the financial system for years, to “clean up” this huge mess?
A: No progressive economist (e.g., Stiglitz or Krugman) could possibly have passed the guard dogs of the plutocracy in the US Senate. Dangerous Socialists like Nobel-prize-winning Princeton economist Krugman could never have been confirmed.
Q: Why is Obama allowing Geithner to shovel trillions in taxpayer money into the bottomless pit of Wall Street?
A: Geithner believes that an overpaid and rapacious elite can manage the US economy far better than colorless bureaucrats who are merely public servants. Thus, Geithner needs to give Wall Street’s predators another chance to gamble away the future financial resources of the republic. Obama hopes that Geithner may get lucky, but he can replace him with another plutocratic guardian if he “fails.”
Q: Why is the government not aggressively investigating the quality of the dubious “toxic” assets so as to have a sound basis for estimating the magnitude of the damage and properly guiding the recovery policy?
A: Obama believes that it is his highest duty to manage public perceptions for the greater good of America, and if that management task requires concealing the magnitude of underlying cause of the current financial disaster, then it is a patriotic act to conceal the truth. The less the public knows about the magnitude of the toxic bubble, the better.
Q: Why won’t Obama simply nationalize failed banks, fire the bad management, and rebuild the banking system in a manner that serves the public interest.
A: Presidents who attempt to discipline the plutocracy don’t finish their term in office. Obama’s job is to give the people hope by slightly reducing the scale of looting of public funds.
Q: How can the people maintain their confidence in Obama?
A: Every time Obama betrays the public trust and fails to honor his campaign pledges, the people will be reminded of how much worse a McCain administration would have been.
So there we have it. Obama, our national savior, is protecting the rich from the poor and the powerful from the weak, and all the while he is making us all feel better about having change we can believe in: the pocket change that is all most of us will own when this is over.