October 01, 2008 07:19 PM UTC

Udall panders, Tancredo shines

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• by: Another skeptic

Mark Udall voted against the bailout bill, H.R. 3997, Monday, while Tom Tancredo voted yes.

The Rocky’s editorial page editor, Vincent Carrol, mocks Udall’s pandering in “Playing to the Crowd,” and one of its many liberal columnists, Bill Johnson, makes Tancredo look like a founding patriot in his piece, Tancredo sees fire that needs fighting.

Key graphs from Carroll:

Udall decided he’d rather play to the popular mood and teach Wall Street a lesson. Hence his rhetoric Sunday on Meet the Press, which throbbed with denunciations of “welfare for CEOs,” “golden parachutes,” “tax breaks for CEOs, tax breaks for companies that offshore jobs, tax breaks for the wealthiest among us, like the oil companies and other large corporate interests.”

Gosh, is even Exxon Mobil now in line for a Treasury rescue? I must have missed that news bulletin.

Bob Schaffer, the Republican Senate candidate, also has been badmouthing the bailout bill – one has to keep voters happy, you know – but at least he didn’t have a role in Monday’s historic vote.

Yes, there are principled reasons for opposing the credit-market bailout – although they are more often articulated by the libertarian right than the progressive left. Libertarians understandably fear a greater permanent role for government in micromanaging financial markets if the bailout deal goes through; they also typically dismiss fears of economic collapse reminiscent of 1873 or 1929 as “ridiculous scaremongering,” to quote one of them. But how can they be so sure? Which celestial authority revealed to them that this country will never have another serious depression?

Meanwhile, much of the public anger – and it is vibrant; the volume of letters to the Rocky, for example, has surged – seems based on misunderstandings of how the bailout would work as well as conspiratorial notions of who’s behind it. After Monday’s stock market plunge, one usually intelligent reader informed me that as far as the Dow Jones Industrial Average “is concerned, the stock traders are committing financial blackmail – give us $700 billion no strings attached, and no one gets hurt.”

Investors were panic-selling in an organized shakedown of the government? Please. If that were so, what gave them second thoughts on Tuesday?

It must make liberals feel great that Udall is such an idiot and Tancredo did his home work and decided that bailing out main street is more important than punishing a few CEOs and millions of shareholders. 50% of U.S. households own stocks directly andthrough mutual funds and exchange traded funds in their 401ks, pension funds, etc.

Udall voted to punish half the households in Colorado.