I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. [But] I think they are in good shape going forward…their prospects going forward are very solid.
Clear and straightforward, right? The top guy overseeing Fannie and Freddie is sounding the all-clear down the road. Good news!
Well, as you know, two months later Fannie, Freddie, and the entire American housing industry tanked. The reason: bad loans made by both government and private banks. Frank was clueless, even though he was in a position of oversight. The folks were depending on him to protect them from financial fools. Frank let us down.
But instead of admitting his appalling mistake and apologizing to those who may have invested in Fannie and Freddie because of him, Barney came on the Factor and lied. On October 2, 2008, I ran the CNBC clip and then confronted the congressman:
Bill O’Reilly: Shouldn’t everybody in the country be angry with you right now?
Barney Frank: No. You’ve misrepresented this consistently. I became chairman of the [finance] committee on January 31, 2007. Less than two months later, I did what the Republicans hadn’t been able to do in twelve years—get through the committee a very tough regulatory bill. And it passed the House in May. I’ve always said two things about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that they have an important role to play, but that regulations need to be improved.
O’Reilly: That’s swell, but you still went out in July and said everything was great. And off that, a lot of people bought stock and have lost everything they had.
Frank: Oh, no.
O’Reilly [voice rising]: Oh, yes!
Frank: I said it wasn’t a good investment.
O’Reilly: Don’t give me any of that. We just heard your own words. You want me to play them again for you?
Frank: You didn’t listen to it…. I said it wasn’t a good investment.
O’Reilly: You said going forward it was going to be swell…. Let’s stop the crap, stop the BS.
Frank: You know, that’s the problem with your show.
O’Reilly: Under your tutelage the [housing] industry has declined 90 percent.
Frank: Yes, but—
O’Reilly: And none of this was your fault? Oh, no. People lost millions of dollars, but it wasn’t your fault? Come on, you coward, say the truth.
Frank: What do you mean, “coward”?
O’Reilly: You’re a coward. You blame everybody else.
Frank: Bill, here’s the problem with your show. You start ranting and the only way to respond is almost to look as boorish as you. But here are the facts. I specifically said in the quote you just played that I didn’t think it was a good investment. I wasn’t telling anybody to buy stock. Secondly, I wasn’t presiding idly over this. I was trying to get regulations adopted.
O’Reilly: Bottom line is, the stock [Fannie Mae] drops 90 percent.
Frank: Yes.
O’Reilly: In any private industry, you’re out.
Frank: No.
O’Reilly: But not in the federal government. You can come in here and make every excuse in the world.
Frank: I’m not going to be bullied by your ranting. You can rant all you want, you’re not going to shut me up! The problem was, we passed a bill in 1994—
O’Reilly: Now we’re back to 1994. This is bull. This is why Americans don’t trust their government.
Frank: No, this is why your stupidity gets in the way of rational discussion.
The shoot-out went on for a few more minutes, but you get the picture. Barney Frank, who had a clear window to the banking industry’s effect on the economy, warned no one that the loan situation was out of control. Why? Because he didn’t know. What he said on CNBC was pathetically true. He thought things would be fine “going forward.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with making an honest mistake. But when our elected leaders will not admit their failings and they play the blame game instead, you, the loyal American, get hurt two times over. First, the pols screw up whatever policy they’re associated with. Then, they deceive those who have been hammered by their ineptitude with lame excuses designed to avoid accountability. Not acceptable.
Barney Frank can bamboozle most interviewers. Not this one. Based on the facts, Frank played a major role in the collapse of the mortgage market. The fact that he won’t admit that makes him a classic Pinhead.
Any questions?
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) wonders what went wrong at a July 2008 committee hearing on the state of the economy.
Associated Press/AP
Photographed by Susan Walsh
In May 2010 a ridiculous footnote was added to the Barney saga. Congress passed new financial oversight legislation. Guess who was out front telling Americans that the tough new law would protect us from further shenanigans in the money industry? Hey, Barney, this Bud’s for you. It was unbelievable.
CHAPTER 2
Barack Hussein Obama—Who Exactly Is This Guy?
MY COLLEAGUE GLENN BECK thinks that the forty-fourth President of the United States is a subversive, a man bent on changing America into some kind of socialistic nanny state that might, God help us, actually resemble France. Beck passionately believes that Barack Obama is a danger to everything Beck values. So Glenn has moved aggressively to challenge the President by using his daily radio and television programs to illustrate the radical stuff he believes is being promoted by the Obama administration.
Rush Limbaugh and many other conservative radio commentators believe pretty much the same thing: that the President is a force for pernicious change, a committed socialist in a two-thousand-dollar suit.
These guys pound President Obama into pudding just about every day, and millions of Americans are spooning up the dessert. But I’m not so sure this scorched-earth strategy aimed at the President is good for the country. I favor a more surgical approach.
Yes, Mr. Obama can be a Pinhead, as we will illustrate, but all Presidents, as I stated, can be assigned a place in that category from time to time. Exactly what Barack Obama’s big-picture vision is remains to be seen. It is entirely possible he doesn’t even have a big-picture scenario. It seems to me that the President is certainly a committed left-wing guy who thrives on power and attention, but I don’t see him as Karl Marx reincarnated.
I could be wrong.
T-shirts bearing slogans popularized by Glenn Beck in his fight against President Obama’s perceived socialism are a hot commodity these days.
T-shirt Artwork by www.FreeSignArtwork.com
Whenever a journalist like me tries to define a President, the situation gets complicated. Accurate analysis is challenging because outsiders (that’s us) can never get all the facts about what goes on in the Oval Office. I mean, I get interesting intelligence information because of my visibility on the Factor, but confirming the validity of it is simply impossible. In other words, I hear and see things, but sometimes context is elusive. Why did Obama do that? How could he have hired this guy? Those are questions that are often asked but rarely answered.
It is soooooo boring to hear Obama supporters bleating out approval no matter what the President does. And it is equally dull to hear the man bashed even for getting up in the morning. That kind of blind partisanship does you no good at all. The good news is, dishonest media like the New York Times and MSNBC are failing. People are simply walking away. The United States needs tough, fair reporting about President Obama because the man’s vision for the country is so different from what he put forth during the campaign. Back in 2008 when Obama was still a senator, he was on the moderate Left. He was a guy who sought reform but not radical change. Since becoming President, however, Obama has emerged as a crusader for “social justice” and has rejected unilateralism overseas. His record spending and softer approach on jihad (he won’t even say the word) have caused deep angst in many quarters. But t
here is definitely a method to the President’s alleged madness, a central reason for what he is putting out there. A core mission of this book is to define that reason and put a Pinhead or Patriot label on it.
By the book’s end, you’ll have a pretty good idea into which category the President belongs. But be forewarned—while we will be brutally honest, we will also be totally fair to the man. It would not be Patriotic to cheap-shot the commander in chief, especially because he’s already staked out some solid positions. Two quick examples are as follows:
Speaking at a Town Hall meeting in the East Room at the White House on Father’s Day 2009, the President said this to American men who father children and leave them:
Just because your own father wasn’t there for you, that’s not an excuse for you to be absent, also—it’s all the more reason for you to be present.
You have an obligation to break the cycle and learn from those mistakes, and to rise up where your own fathers fell short and to do better than they did with your own children.
That statement is not exactly breaking news, but it is correct and badly needed advice in a country where 17 million children are living with their mothers in single-parent households.
The second example of the President taking a strong and necessary stand occurred on June 6, 2009, at the Esperanza National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference, where the President directly addressed the illegal immigration mess:
The American people believe in immigration, but they also believe that we can’t tolerate a situation where people come to the United States in violation of the law….
For those who wish to become citizens, we should require them to pay a penalty and pay taxes, learn English, go to the back of the line behind those who play by the rules.
In this latter instance, the words are all there, but the deeds may be lacking. At this point in history, the border with Mexico is becoming more secure thanks to the incredibly expensive barrier fence and increased federal patrolling that have been put in place. But as the controversial Arizona law allowing state and local police to detain suspected illegal aliens who are already involved in a police matter demonstrates, the border/alien problem is still a mess, and the federal government must stop the madness or the states themselves will take action.
BORDERLINE PINHEADS
As you may know, the Factor editorialized as far back as the year 2002 that the National Guard be deployed to back up the patrol efforts. President Bush resisted that for years but did, after a series of grisly crimes in the area, finally order about 5,000 guardsmen to the border. Wherever they were stationed, crime and smuggling dropped big-time. I mean, come on, if you’re a drug or people smuggler and you know there’s a chance of running into the U.S. military, are you going to take the risk of being captured and having your illegal cargo seized? Not likely.
After Mr. Bush left office, the Obama administration pulled the National Guard back. Why? I don’t know. No explanation was forthcoming. But then Arizona went wild, and on May 26, 2010, the President finally ordered a small contingent of the guard to return. The announcement said “up to 1,200” troops would be deployed. But that is far too few, is it not?
In making the National Guard announcement, President Obama, like President Bush before him, seemed reluctant. Clearly, his heart was not into having a military presence there.
U.S. Border Patrol agents (pictured here in Sasabe, Arizona) need more help from the National Guard to deal with the influx of illegal aliens.
Associated Press/AP
Photographed by Matt York
But why not? The answer has to be politics. Both Obama and Bush believe that many Hispanic Americans resent immigration actions that target their brothers and sisters. And Hispanics are a fast-growing voting bloc, one that gave Barack Obama much support.
So when the President saw his job favorability rating drop 12 points in the first four months of 2010, giant red flags went up. That’s why Mr. Obama will not take dramatic action to seal the border with Mexico even though narcotics and illegal aliens continue to flow into the United States.
On the Republican side, the Grand Old Party needs to win back at least some Hispanic support. President Bush understood the importance of wooing the socially conservative Hispanic voting bloc and did everything he could to mollify that group, including looking the other way as millions of illegal aliens crossed into the United States. President Obama has continued Bush’s policy.
But the rest of America isn’t buying it. Polls say that the majority of American voters support a tough crackdown on the illegal alien intrusion (about 60 percent approved of the Arizona law). President Obama sided with the Far Left, however, and condemned the Arizona legislature, explaining that he believes the Arizona authorities might practice “racial profiling” in enforcing the law. That, of course, is speculation, but the President has fully embraced the anti-Arizona point of view and ordered the Justice Department to sue the state—a boneheaded political move if there ever was one. The President and his lawyers apparently believe that states are prohibited from passing laws dealing with immigration enforcement because that is the sole responsibility of the federal government. In fact, just as this book was going to print, and hours before the new immigration law was to go into effect, one of Arizona’s own courts, under U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton, sided with the Justice Department’s position, placing an injunction on provisions of the law stating that they “would impose a ‘distinct, unusual, and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.” This is the crux of the Obama lawsuit.
Fox News anchor and attorney Megyn Kelly believes that there is legal precedent for allowing Arizona to better protect itself against the invasion it is experiencing. But Ms. Kelly also points out that the lawsuit is heavily ideological and federal judges are likely to rule on what they believe, not what the Constitution says and what previous courts have upheld. Like the Bush v. Gore case, which was decided in the Supreme Court along ideological lines, this lawsuit will most likely produce an obviously partisan split. But just the fact that President Obama is once again at odds with the American people makes the story extremely important and compelling.
Realizing that he was lining up against the will of most Americans, Mr. Obama knew he had to do something, so he pulled out the National Guard card and gently put it on the table. As stated before, though, his heart isn’t into sending the guardsmen there, no matter how small the number.
The blunt truth is that both President Obama and President Bush are Pinheads when it comes to securing the southern border of the United States. The federal government’s primary constitutional responsibility is to protect the rights of Americans and keep them safe from foreign intrusion. Certainly, more than 10 million illegal aliens running around the country basically unsupervised is an intrusion. Ten thousand guardsmen stationed on the border would dramatically reduce the smuggling of drugs and human beings into our homeland. The soldiers would protect American citizens under siege down there and would prevent the brutal exploitation of the aliens themselves. It is flat-out disgraceful that the U.S. border with Mexico has been a sieve for decades. There is absolutely no excuse for that other than a lack of will on the part of our Presidents.
Sooner or later, a tough but fair assessment of illegal aliens already in the USA is going to happen, but nothing will be accomplished on that front until Americans are convinced that the border is under control. That could be a major problem for Mr. Obama going forward. Like President Bush before him, Obama seems squeamish on border security. Even taking into account the Hispanic American vote, I could never understand why our leaders simply will not do the right thing for the country. It’s insane. Allowing illegal alien chaos is one of the biggest Pinhead policies ever designed, and the vast majority of the American people, including Hispanics, know it. Our prisons are full of aliens who have committed violent crimes against Americans. Just that awful fact alone should compel
a strict illegal alien policy. So the President is caught between Barack and a hard place on this one. Yes, he’s his own biggest obstacle here. He’s playing to his Far Left base, who essentially want open borders. In the meantime, the majority of the American people want security and order. Along with national health care (which illegal aliens will receive, you watch), the immigration issue could wind up badly damaging Mr. Obama’s political future.
WHEN EVERYTHING STARTED TO TANK
In addition to having their ideology and hypothetical wish lists tested, all Presidents have to contend with the problem-solving factor. And it is here that Barack Obama took a terrible beating in the spring of 2010—a hammering that might limit him to one term in office.
On April 20 a British Petroleum deepwater oil rig exploded and sank one mile to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. In the disaster, which took place forty-two miles off the coast of Louisiana, eleven workers were killed. Two days after the explosion destroyed the $560 million Horizon rig, a five-mile-long oil slick was sighted. BP announced that the equivalent of about 1,000 barrels of oil a day was seeping into the Gulf, but the company confidently stated it would soon have things under control. Sure. I don’t know about you, but I was skeptical from the jump about BP’s honesty. Also, I knew damn well that the federal government was counting on the oil company to fix the problem, and in life, whenever you count on someone else you’re often disappointed. By the way, about those 1,000 barrels a day? The true number was more than eight times that, and there has since been documentation suggesting that the number could be as high as 100,000 barrels a day!
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