Former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and presumptive First Woman President Hillary Clinton was barking like a dog on the campaign trail the other day, and lest you think that’s some sexist slur please understand that she was quite literally barking like a dog. The bit got a good laugh from her fans, who are so humorless they’ve kept a straight face through all her explanations about her e-mails and Benghazi and the numerous other Clinton family scandals, and it was approvingly noted by the liberal press, which is eager to show her lighter side, while the more conservative media made sport of it. Donald J. Trump, the foul-mouthed real-estate-and-gambling-and-professional-wrestling-and-reality-show carnival barker who is currently leading the Republican field, seemed to find it undignified.
We found the impression a failed but harmless attempt at humor, and hardly worth mentioning, but we wish more attention was paid to what she was barking about.
After recalling an ad that once ran on rural Arkansas radio featuring a dog that would bark whenever a candidate said something untrue, sounding very folksy as she related the story, Clinton said “I want to figure out how we can do that with Republicans. We need to get that dog to follow them around and every time they say things like ‘Oh, the great recession was caused by too much regulation, then ‘bark, bark, bark.'” The crowd roared its approval, of course, but they failed to realize the joke is on them.
Any competent lie-detecting dog would not be only barking furiously at the implied argument that the great recession was caused by too little regulation, it would be straining at its leash and salivating for blood, and Clinton surely knows this better than most. The last round of significant financial de-regulation was signed into law during the administration of her hound dog husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the subsequent Republican administration added the countless regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley and countless regulators to enforce them, and the banks didn’t make hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to people with little chance of paying them off because the Republicans had deviously repealed some rule against it but rather because Clinton’s husband’s administration coerced and cajoled and incentivized them to do so in the name of fairness. At first the policy fed a housing bubble that seemed to make the entire country richer, and those suckers with the subprime mortgages were able to stay afloat on the rising real estate tide, and Clinton successfully ran for the Senate bragging about it, but eventually it all came crashing down into a very well regulated pile.
The notion that greedy Wall Street bankers eager to get rich by making hundreds of billions of dollars of loans that were unlikely to ever be paid back were to blame, and that even more government coercion and cajoling and incentivizing were therefore required, quickly became the widely accepted story. Even Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain went along with it, and the dissenting voices with their facts and arguments and lack of any recognizable villains other than well-intentioned government servants were quickly drowned out in the boos. Now it’s just one of those things that every knows even though it’s not at all true, much like that “Bush lied, people died” theory of the Iraq War that even the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is peddling, and at this point Clinton’s barking dog shtick will be very difficult to refute.
Still, we’d like to see someone in the Republican field make a stab at it, and not just by mocking the barking dog impersonation. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is still defending the free market system, and he does some pretty convincing impersonations of characters from “The Princess Bride” and “The Simpsons,” so perhaps he’s up to the task. The boastful billionaire front-runner is more inclined to criticize Wall Street’s greed than the regulators’ good intentions, the rest of the field seems reluctant to champion that good old red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism that doesn’t make bad loans even for fairness’ sake, and we certainly can’t expect the unfashionable truth from the self-described socialist who is currently the front-runner in the Democratic race.
All in all, it’s enough to make us barking mad.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 