Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, long ignored by the left side of the media, has finally managed to score some points with CNN by criticizing John McCain.
The network, which has rarely (if ever?) mentioned Malkin before, dubbed her not just a conservative blogger, but a “prominent” conservative blogger. They think she’s worth knowing now because they love it when the right goes to war with its own candidate.
McCain has never been a darling of the right and his impromptu proposal to implement a government buy-out of bad mortgages has lots of folks on the right in conniption fits. Nina Easton, Washington bureau editor for Fortune magazine looked like she’d seen a ghost after McCain unveiled the plan during the second presidential debate last week. And, The National Review, which CNN now considers “influential”—now that it’s knocking McCain—has published an editorial that critiques the plan as “creating a level of moral hazard that is unacceptable.” As if Fannie and Freddie's takeover by the government on Sept. 7 hadn't already essentially done this. This is absolutely hilarious. It’s like watching the local whorehouse (CNN) decorate for Christmas (use conservative sources, for a change) because whatever Christian values might dictate about prostitution (CNN's biased reporting), it’s a time when men get drunk and generous (when the right wing peanut gallery can be of use to CNN in trashing McCain).
But if we get beyond the tawdry media show, what we’ll find is the old McCain, the one I have been missing for a while, the one who had the balls to tell the religious right to screw off and who did the right thing more than he did the partisan thing. They can fall into auto-pilot mode with the “moral hazard” chant if they wish, but McCain’s plan would accomplish the thing that might have ultimately been accomplished by Sen. Chuck Hagel’s Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005. The measure would have put a separate agency in charge of making sure that Fannie and Freddie were solvent and operating in a responsible fashion. That agency would likely have had the power to take over, or delegate to some other organization, the bad loans that Franklin Raines’ policies at Fannie created. But, the act died in the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs thanks to the delays created by Democrats Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Chris Dodd, and Sen. Jack Reed. And, as I mentioned before, the takeover of Fannie and Freddie last month pretty much did this anyway.
The right wing of the Republican Party has always hated John McCain and you don’t get much further to the right than Michelle Malkin. Michelle is in a panic, as are many of those on the far right. They’re terrified of an Obama administration and they want to believe that it is McCain’s lack of rightwing credentials that is likely to lose the White House for the GOP. News flash: The religious right just isn’t the powerhouse it used to be. There are more self-identified independent voters than evangelical voters now, a trend that has been growing since 2000 and will continue to grow as America and the rest of the world urbanizes. They smell their own demise and they are blindly lashing out. The problem with the McCain ticket isn’t McCain, it’s their girl Palin, but they can’t accept that so they are making a lot of noise about anything that McCain does.