The Conservative Soldier

In reading a review of The Sellout by CNBC on-air editor and veteran Wall Street journalist Charles Gasparino, a passage paraphrasing a section of the book jumped off the page and nearly strangled me. I found myself reading it again and again.

In 1995, Henry Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—two “government-sponsored enterprises” in housing finance—to buy and guarantee mortgages of low- and moderate-income borrowers amounting to 42% of their annual business volume. His successor, Andrew Cuomo, moved the number up to 50% and directed Fannie and Freddie to buy the mortgages of borrowers with “very low income.”

The Sellout likely will not be widely read by the mainstream media or the general public, yet it probably should be mandatory reading, based on the story it tells. Ostensibly, the book details the U.S. and subsequent global financial meltdown of 2008. But it’s not about 2008. It is a chronicle of provisions put in place, deliberately, by liberal Democrat officials, primarily, as long ago as 1995 during the Clinton Presidency. It tracks the choices that were made that would imperil the U.S. economy down the road and, tragically, influence voters to believe the hope-and-change rhetoric of Barack Hussein Obama.

The events of 2008 are tragic on many levels, but perhaps especially because they ushered a Socialist into the White House. Obama can not take credit for the reckless actions of Cisneros, Cuomo, and Congressmen such as Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel (left), who cheered as the housing bubble inflated, and turned away as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission were complicit in letting it happen. But Obama certainly leveraged the crisis to serve his Alinsky agenda.

I happen to believe that Hank Paulson was the wrong Treasury Secretary at the wrong time under President Bush, and that Bush erred in heeding Paulson’s bail out panic attack, but, as The Sellout makes plainly evident, the regulatory levees had been weakening for years. The financial Katrina  was coming regardless.

The lesson of 2008 is not simply that greedy people made mistakes, though some did. The lesson is that radical liberals always will calculate the power to be gained by their decisions while ignoring how those calculations will diminish American strength and stature.

There was power to be garnered by creating an era of home ownership for the lowest income groups. So, too, there was power to be seized this year by handing downtrodden citizens checks for their clunkers and more checks for first-time home buying. And the ultimate power grab that has them all salivating like thirsty attack dogs is a Federal Government monopoly over health care and health insurance.

Let these words resonate: The radical left cares nothing about America’s economic might, or our military strength, or our moral fortitude. It just wants the power fix and what it perceives as eternal ownership of its grateful core constituency. It is a crack addiction, but likely is even worse than the analogy suggests. Crack addicts destroy themselves, torment their families and occasionally take down an innocent victim or two. Societal “power-crack” abuse diminishes America and makes the world an increasingly dangerous place.

How else to explain the bankrupting of America to achieve the goal of owning health care?