Washington Runs as Normal

I've been very disappointed in the goings-on (or, rather, lack of them) in Washington D.C. recently.

The Republicans derailed Obama's push for a rapid reform of America's health care system - but this was clearly motivated more out of partisan politics than meeting the needs of America's health care consumers.

Delaying the vote until after the summer recess smacks of laziness and self interest. From the very beginning, postponing the vote was the Conservatives' sole objective. If the Republicans really had America's best interests at heart, they'd have put their nose to the grindstone and hammered out a bipartisan solution, instead of doing what Washington does best and procrastinating.

But likewise, it's business as normal in DC for the Democrats as well. Today, Democrats Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad got caught lying to America about their preferential treatment by Countrywide Financial Corp. - the organisation blamed for throwing America's mortgage industry down the toilet.

As I wrote in this post, it was corruption, greed and sleaze on behalf of the Democrats which brought down America's housing market - not President Bush's so-called 'unregulated' market. It was politicians like Dodd and Conrad who fought to maintain the grossly overinflated mortgage market - and today's findings prove that they did it entirely for their own selfish ends.

The fact that Chris Dodd heads the Banking Committee and is responsible for solving America's foreclosure crisis would be funny if it wasn't so terrifying. He helped create this debacle. Isn't he the least qualified man in America to fix it?

Funnily enough, the list of Countrywide's 'VIP members' is filled with those responsible for perpetuating the Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac farce. James Johnson, a former head of Fannie Mae, also received a 'sweetheart' deal on his mortgages, as did Franklin Raines, who also headed Fannie Mae. It's so blatantly transparent that corruption, sleaze and double dealings were going on that I'm frankly astonished that nobody's been carted off to jail yet.

Don't get me wrong - the Republicans have their share of corruption going on. Let's not forget that the war in Iraq proved hugely profitable for Halliburton, coincidentally [or rather, not - Editorial Bear] former employer of Vice President Dick Cheney.

But even that blood-soaked, foreign quagmire pales in comparison to the level of greed and corruption that hurled America into an economic pit unrivalled since the days of the Great Depression.

It's a chilling reminder that Barack Obama's 'change you can believe in' hasn't yet materialized - and whatever your political sensibilities, anybody with half a brain can see that Republicans and Democrats are, at the end of the day, pretty much as worthless and corrupt as each other.