Sullivan's Diluting the Malkin Award
Andrew Sullivan created the Malkin Award for "shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric." Certainly a worthy cause, but he undermines the value of that label when he nominates remarks like Lisa Schiffren's:
I always listen to Mark Levin while making Friday night dinner. Tonight he is giving the most serious, intelligent, cogent explanation of the current economic crisis I have heard or read anywhere. He is giving a precise political and legislative history going back several administrations, but concentrated in the Clinton Administration, where the major changes that led down this road were initiated. Funnily enough, he has explained just what it is community organizers do. Advocating, for instance, for affordable housing for the poor — the poor who traditionally rent, because they are bad loan risks. The day that reasoning by banks was junked as "racist," was the day this crisis became a possibility. I don't think he's ad-libbing — and I, for one would love to read the transcript at NRO in the next day or two.
I didn't hear Mr. Levin's show, nor have I ever heard it. However, if Ms. Schiffren is describing his comments accurately, this shouldn't be held as an example of the depths to which Republicans speak. Quite the opposite. This is essential truth that needs to be spread.
Ignore the connotations to Obama because this is far larger than whose ass warms the White House.
One of the issues at the heart of the current set of poor economic symptoms is the simple fact that people were encouraged to live beyond their means. Ideally, I'd just call this marketing and leave it at that because people who attempt this cannot do so forever. Debts need to be paid and paid with money. Those who can't pay their debts will see their financial reputation negatively affected and will be offered fewer and fewer opportunities to play with other peoples' wealth. The truly incorrigible face bankruptcy and poverty for being reckless, and rightfully so.
But that isn't how things are. No, now there are various public sentiments that interlock into a web of collectivistic protections that shame, insult, or outright ban perfectly legitimate actions people want to take in order to protect their property. Combine that with the inflationary bubble created by the Fed and its banking system partners-in-crime and the result is a system where commission-hungry brokers encouraged or helped people to lie on their mortgage forms to secure nonexistent money from institutional frauds who quickly spun around to sell those empty promises to financial giants who, blinded by their sense of entitlement and power, couldn't be bothered to perform basic due diligence on the assets in which they invested the trust of millions. Lies were pyramided upon lies that were repackaged as gold and sold all over the world as safe investments.
Identifying one of the central problems is hardly intemperate right-wing rhetoric. It is absolutely necessary if anyone is going to fucking learn anything from this mess!