In Praise of Bullying

(Sigh) "Conservative" columnist George Will has another piece out questioning whether John McCain is fit to be president. Will bases his criticism of McCain on the latter's reaction to the financial woes on Wall Street and the proposed bail-out legislation. There are three points made by Will in need of comment:

1. Will, like most cognoscenti (even the normally independent-minded Christopher Hitchens), contemptuously dismisses McCain's call for SEC Chairman Chris Cox to be fired. In one sense, Will, Hitchens & Co. are correct: Cox should not be fired. Rather, in a truly just world, he would be publicly flogged and banished from our shores. First, Cox is a lightweight who commands no respect on Wall Street (CNBC reporter Charles Gasparino underscored that point in a recent appearance on "Kudlow & Co."). Second, Cox has been asleep at the switch. The SEC should have been moving aggressively back in 2007 to address the issue of financial disclosure requirements in order to forestall a run on the investment banks. Encouraging greater transparency *before* a crisis begins is one of the best ways to forestall that crisis. However, the real sin of Chris Cox is that he is arguably the single greatest contributor to the current crisis. In 1995, Cox sponsored the Private Securities Litigation and Reform Act, which served to protect corporate management, auditors and lawyers from being sued for fraud in civil court. The results have been disastrous. Accountants and lawyers, freed from liability, no longer have any incentive to scrutinize the finances of their clients, nor encourage full disclosure. Market transparency is an essential precondition for market efficiency; Cox's PSLRA made US capital markets more opaque. The net result has been an increase in the size, and probably the frequency, of financial fraud on the part of public corporations. Moreover, the Bush administration has used the DOJ to target the law firms who used to sue companies that defrauded their shareholders. As is often the case, someone gets screwed whenever Bush and Cox get together, and in this instance it was the American public.
2. Will also gets his panties in a bunch about the socialist nature of the bailout package. To this assertion, a thinking person's only riposte is "No sh*t, Sherlock." Let's face some hard facts, Willbo Baggins: There is nothing to like in the bailout package except that it is necessary. Both political parties have contributed mightily to the current mess, with a Best Supporting Actor award going to Alan Greenspan. We can moan and groan as much as we want about the horrors of government intervention, but there's no avoiding it at this juncture. Of course, not all forms of federal intervention are equal (see, for example, Donald Luskin's excellent critique of the AIG bailout).
3. Finally, Willbo frets about McCain's Manichaean world-view. "Manichaean" is often a derogatory, inside-the-Beltway term for moral clarity. Now, I certainly don't agree with John McCain on everything - not by a long-shot. However, I like a politician who isn't afraid to make judgments and call the shots as he/she sees them (in contrast, think of John Kerry, a.k.a. "Johnny Nuance"). McCain makes some mistakes, and shoots from the hip a bit too often, but I prefer it over the mealy-mouthed incompetence of the Bush administration, or the sheer moral cowardice of Urkel & Joey Hairplugs.

Where does bullying fit into all of this? I've loathed Georgina since I first saw him speak back in the fall of 1987 (the speech was on what a wonderful thing the War on Drugs is - but of course there's nothing socialist about incarcerating hundreds of thousands of people for purchasing commodities disapproved of by the government). How did George Will, this Iago of American conservatism, get to be such a douchebag? I blame it on the absence of "knuckular" fortitude on the part of bullies (provided that there were any) at Will's alma mater, the University Laboratory High School. What decent adolescent male could have resisted beating the crap out of a young George Will? Apparently, enough did. The insufficiently beaten young Will then went off to finishing school at the Trinity College for Insufferable Pricks (alma mater of the unbearable Tucker Carlson).

Still, I'd rather suffer through an hour of Tucker & Georgina than five minutes of Keith Olbermann.