Back on 1 September, Ebert wrote a post bearing the charming title “Put up or shut up”. It amounted to a call for prominent Republicans to make a great production out of denouncing claims to the effect that Obama was a Muslim. This was either an incredibly naive or massively disingenuous post. Today, I’d like to explain why I say that, and why I waited so long to comment on it.
Persuasion
When you’re attempting to persuade, you want to talk about those issues that support your point. When Ebert wrote his piece we were deep into the 2010 midterm election season, and Republicans and Democrats were each attempting to persuade voters to back their side in the election. Any fair reading of Ebert’s political stuff would put him firmly in the “Democrat” column, and mark him as an active participant in the attempt to persuade.
Field of Battle
In early September, the GOP was beating the stuffing out of the Dems in the persuasion contest; whether on taxes, spending, defense, terrorism, or health care, the GOP was happy to talk about the issues because it was winning on them. The only sensible response to this for the Dems was to try to change the subject to something that favored them.
What was a good topic? Well, there weren’t many, but this “Muslim” thing seemed like a good one. If the debate could be made into a question of whether or not Obama was a Muslim … well, the Dems could win that argument.
Bad Advice
This is what makes Ebert’s statement:
We know, because they’ve said so publicly, that George W. Bush, his father and Sen. John McCain do not believe Obama is a Muslim. This is the time — now, not later — for them to repeat that belief in a joint statement. Other prominent Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul also certainly do not believe it. They have a responsibility to make that clear by subscribing to the statement. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh must join, or let their silence indict them.
so silly. For GOP-types to even bring up the “Muslim” question would have been to play into the hands of Dem strategists, because it would have shifted the playing field to something the Dems could win on. If Ebert didn’t understand this when he wrote the piece (and impugned the integrity of any GOP pol who wouldn’t do the damn fool thing he suggested) then he’s incredibly naive. If he did understand it, he’s a disingenuous creep.
I didn’t bring this up at the time, because, well, I didn’t want to change the subject.
Rant
It’s hard to read Ebert without going off on a rant. The rest of this post is an extended exercise in my calling him an idiot; if that doesn’t sound like something you’d enjoy, you can sign off now, and I’ll be happy to see you tomorrow.
Ebert writes (this is basically an ad hominem shot at those who disagree with his preferred policies):
A democracy depends on an informed electorate to survive. An alarming number of Americans and a majority of Republicans are misinformed.
but then goes on to write the following, which is misinformed (or reflects misinformation) in every important respect:
Our economy has collapsed and it seemed clear to many Americans that the unregulated greed of Wall Street trading, especially in derivatives, was responsible. These were not investments in industry, the economy or the future. They were investments in a bold Ponzi scheme which defrauded home owners into fronting for a pyramid of worthless loans. Citizens lost their homes, investment houses went bankrupt, but the criminals responsible continued to pay themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses.
Consider:
- “Wall Street trading” is heavily regulated. That not all aspects of it are regulated as Ebert would prefer does not an unregulated market make. “Improperly regulated”, maybe. “Unregulated”, no.
- As others have pointed out, blaming “greed” for financial crises is like blaming gravity for airplane crashes. Greed has always been, and always will be, a part of the human condition. It’s not as if people were greedier in 2008 than in 1998.
- A “Ponzi scheme” is a type of fraud with an identifiable meaning; it doesn’t simply refer to any shaky (or shady) investment. A Ponzi scheme is a fraud in which someone claims to be able to deliver extraordinary returns, and pretends to do so by first collecting investments, and then using the collected money as a prop, returning portions of it while claiming that they represent “profits”. The con man relies upon the apparent liquidity of his venture to attract new investment, which will further fund the deception. At some point, he takes the remaining principle and absconds with it. By no stretch of the imagination was the housing bubble, or derivative trading in general, a Ponzi scheme.
- At the root of the crisis seems to have been a lot of bad mortgage paper; securities backed by home mortgages that weren’t going to be paid.
- The purchase of this bad paper was promoted by the government:
There were three important ways that the government pushed investors toward investing in mortgage debt. First, the regulatory capital requirements associated with mortgage debt were lower than for other investments. Second, the government encouraged the private market to extend credit to previously underserved borrowers through a combination of legislation, regulation, and moral suasion. Third, and most important, during the bubble’s expansion, the largest investors in the mortgage market, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—were instruments of U.S. government housing policy.
- “Home owners” weren’t “defrauded”. (If anything, as the people who borrowed money they didn’t pay back, they should bear some culpability for the crisis; remember that if everyone had simply paid what he owed, there would have been no bad paper, and therefore no crisis.) “Fraud”, like “Ponzi scheme”, is a word that actually means something, and the (vast majority of) people who took out mortgages simply weren’t deceived or cheated; at best they made a bad decision. (At worst, they consciously decided to gamble with someone else’s money, hoping that their property would continue to appreciate.)
- Ebert’s claim that “home owners” “[fronted] for a pyramid of worthless loans” is somewhere between bizarre and incoherent. I think Ebert means “fronting” in the sense of “advancing“, i.e., “putting up the money for”. This is 100% backwards; “home owners” were lent money advanced (“fronted”) by other people, i.e., the suckers left holding the bad paper that precipitated the crisis. Furthermore, although the loans were worthless (or more accurately, worth less) because the “home owners” were (to put it uncharitably) deadbeats, those loans didn’t really form a pyramid in any meaningful sense; Ebert is just tossing that word around because, like “Ponzi scheme”, people know that pyramids+money=bad.
- Ebert claims that “criminals” were responsible for all this, but strangely declines to say who they were, or what crimes they committed. He claims that they “continued to pay themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses”, but doesn’t explain how they managed this when their “investment houses went bankrupt”. I guess only the blameless banks went belly-up, and/or their culpable executives magicked themselves into other gigs, despite the teensy-weensy black spot on their resume of destroying their previous employer’s business.
Jerk.
More Ranting
There’s also this:
The new issue of Vanity Fair mentions in its profile of Sarah Palin, as a casual aside, that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena’ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for the date of September 11, 2010. What do you think that means? It could mean Beck simply wants to hold a rally in the home state of the woman who shared his podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech.
…
If Beck had planned to come to Anchorage on another date, it wouldn’t have excited much notice. But any meeting in Alaska on 9/11 without Palin also present will be anticlimactic. It’s too far to go not to feature her. The symbolic date of 9/11 invests this event with the inescapable possibility that he and Palin plan to announce their Presidential candidacy for 2012.
Now, as we all know, this didn’t happen. Furthermore, it was entirely foreseeable that it wouldn’t happen; September 2010 is too early (way too early) to announce a 2012 Presidential run, and it would have been the height of political foolishness for a controversial figure to do so just when his party is poised to make large gains in the midterms. The maxim is “never interfere when your opponent is self-destructing”, and the violation of this maxim would have earned any such figure the undying enmity of the political class indispensable to any successful campaign or administration.
In short: For a man who complains that his opponents are misinformed, Ebert knows remarkably little about economics and politics, despite feeling free to hold forth on both. Glass houses. Stones. Kettle. Pot. Black.
