POLITICS - Of Selective Memory?

"No hint of irony" by John Feehery, The Hill

President Barack Obama, with no hint of irony, had this to say about former Goldman-Sachs CEO and current New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine: “Now, listening to Jon's opponent, you'd think New Jersey was the only state that's been swept up by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression," said Obama, "which, by the way, didn't start under Jon Corzine's party's watch. There seems to be some selective memory about how we got into this fix."

Well, how we got in this fix is because guys like Jon Corzine, who made hundreds of millions of dollars at Goldman-Sachs, and George Soros, who made billions manipulating currencies, did everything they could to stop the regulation of unregulated over-the-counter derivatives.

As the liberal public television program “Frontline” exposed earlier this week, the efforts to stop regulations were led by Robert Rubin, President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, President Obama’s national economic adviser, and Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s Treasury secretary.

Obama said the state's economic problems are part of the nation's overall crisis, which is in turn the product of lax regulation and trickle-down economics promoted by the GOP: "They got a lot of nerve — they leave this big mess and suddenly they're complaining about how fast we're cleaning it up."

Well, the fact of the matter is that the Democrats have thus far done nothing to clean it up. In fact, many analysts think the situation is actually getting worse.

Corzine won his election as governor because of the millions of dollars he made at Goldman-Sachs. I don’t know if they were ill-gotten gains or not, but I do know that when Corzine was there, he was fighting hard to stop the regulations that could have prevented last year’s meltdown. As governor, Corzine has been a complete disaster, and his only campaign strategy thus far has been to call his opponent fat and hope that the third-party candidate saves his bacon.

Barack Obama, of course, became president because he was able to ride a wave created in large part by the donations of George Soros. Soros and a couple of his colleagues put in millions of dollars to fund front groups, including MoveOn.org. Without the help of those front groups, I doubt Obama would be our president today.

And for those who have short memories, last year Soros said that last year’s financial crisis was good for his bottom line. In other words, Soros made lots of money off of everybody else’s misfortune.

But, with no hint of irony, standing next to a former Goldman-Sachs CEO, Barack Obama has the temerity to blame Chris Christie and the GOP for the problems that haunt New Jersey’s economy.