This morning, I was very pleasantly surprised by something that happened, or rather didn't happen, here at Daily Kos. As my eye was running down the recent diary list, this title jumped out me: Yves Smith: Corrupt Obama Administration Pressuring NY AG to Support Mortgage Whitewash.
I thought the headline was over the top and over the line, but I was really shocked and disgusted by the contents of the article, which was reprinted in full as per bobswern's agreement with Yves Smith.
Here are a few highlights, from Smith's article:
It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.
[snip]
[T]he nauseating gap between the Administration’s propaganda and the many and varied ways it sells out average Americans on behalf of its favored backers, in this case the too big to fail banks, has become so noisome that it has become impossible to ignore the fetid smell.
The Administration has now taken to pressuring parties that are not part of the machinery reporting to the President to fall in and do his bidding. We’ve gotten so used to the US attorney general being conveniently missing in action that we have forgotten that regulators and the AG are supposed to be independent. As one correspondent noted by e-mail, “When officials allegiances are to El Supremo rather than the Constitution, you walk the path to fascism.”
[Snip]
The latest example is its heavy-handed campaign to convert New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman to a card carrying member of the “be nice to our lords and masters the banksters” club. Schneiderman was the first to take issue with the sham of the so-called 50 state attorney general mortgage settlement. As far as the Administration is concerned, its goal is to give banks a talking point and prove to them that Team Obama is protecting their backs in a way that the chump public hopefully won’t notice.
[snip]
Obama’s incentives are to come up with “solutions” that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry’s goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress.
If you read Ms. Smith's article, you will find not one shred of evidence to back up the corruption charge. And her repeated references to fascism and Soviet communism are reminiscent of nothing more than the over-the-top paranoid rantings of a crank far-right newsletter. It's really a disgraceful performance.
But now we come to why I was so pleasantly surprised. I thought that a diary published by celebrity diarist bobswern presenting an overheated vitriolic rant against the President on a topic that had already been shown to have some serious rec list mojo by Ray Pensador's diary, would surely rocket to the top of the rec list and stay there all day.
So, I was extremely surprised and delighted when the diary just drifted off of the recent list without ever cracking the rec list. As of the writing of this diary, it only has a modest 41 tips & recs.
I would like to believe that a lot of kossacks who are quite critical of this President found the content of Smith's article to be over-the-line. If you are someone who normally tips and recs bobswern diaries and made a decision not today, please let me know why in comments. Thanks.