Overnight the Republicans have discovered that the Goldman Sachs fraud case is not only a club that Obama can use to beat them into submission over regulatory reform, but also a club that the Republicans can use to beat Obama for turning his administration over to the Giant Vampire Squid.
Yesterday’s New York Post featured a Page 6 cartoon showing a clown in the anteroom to the office of Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein, with his secretary announcing, “The SEC is here to see you.” Goldman Sachs, according to the serried ranks of Post columnists, was the victim of a nefarious Washington plot to destroy free markets.
Today, the Page 6 cartoon shows Goldman Sachs as a grinning poker dealer with aces tumbling out of his sleeves, saying “What a surprise! The house wins again!” And the columnists observe that Goldman Sachs is all over the Obama administration like white on rice.
Michelle Malkin offers:
While President Obama assails the culture of greed and recklessness practiced by the men of Goldman Sachs, his administration is infested with them. The White House can no more disown Government Sachs than Obama can disown Chicago politics.
Obama is headed to Wall Street tomorrow to demand “financial regulatory reform” — just as the US Securities and Exchange Commission has filed civil suit against Goldman Sachs for mortgage-related fraud.
Question the timing? Darn tootin’.
As the New York Post reported Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee immediately bought sponsored Internet ads on Google that direct Web surfers who type in “Goldman Sachs SEC” to Obama’s fund-raising site....
Democrats are silent on the $994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged in the 2008 presidential race. The class-warfare Dems are also mum on all the president’s Goldman men sitting in the catbird’s seat:
* Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, “as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil.”
Gensler said he was sorry — hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.
* Goldman kept White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on a $3,000 monthly retainer while he worked as presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s chief fund-raiser, as first reported by Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney. The financial titans threw in another $50,000 to become the Clinton primary campaign’s top funder.
Emanuel received nearly $80,000 in campaign contributions from Goldman during his four terms in Congress — investments that have reaped untold rewards, as Emanuel assumed a leading role championing the trillion-dollar TARP banking bailout law.
* Former Goldman lobbyist Mark Patterson serves under Geithner as his top deputy and overseer of TARP bailout — $10 billion of which went to Goldman Sachs.
The Post also reports that Republicans demand that Obama return $1 million of campaign contributions from the Squid.
“I say, is this newspaper honest?”
“Az ze day iz long.”
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