"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 11 May 2009 20:48:08 -0700, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:


"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
. ..
On Mon, 11 May 2009 17:37:54 -0700, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:


"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
m...
On Sun, 10 May 2009 20:48:09 -0700, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:
snip
McCain/Palin wouldn't have beaten Obama/Biden regardless George.
Presidential politics had a big influence on what Paulson did.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Paulson pulled the trigger at a
time
of his choosing specifically to prevent McCain from prevailing.
I wear a belt even when I've got my suspenders on.
He certainly knew what the Lehman failure would do and Bernanke could
have
prevented that from happening.

Now there's a scenario I hadn't thought of.

No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up.

This would also [help] explain the fratricidal rift within the
GOP. My cousin is a long-term county Republican party official
and she remarked several times during the campaign that it was
almost like several individuals on the Republican national &
state committees and some of the Republican pacs were trying to
lose.

McCain was never really expected to win. He was to be this generations
Barry
Goldwater.
To paraphrase the line Senator Lloyd Benson said to Republican VP
candidate Dan Quayle, "I knew Barry Goldwater, and he is no Barry
Goldwater, although he is a senator from Arizona."

You miss the point.
Ed and I hashed this out here in this group a year
before the election. I believe you contributed to the several threads
George.
This election wasn't initially about how the Republican candidate would win
but how they would lose and on a grand scale.
They needed a candidate that Hillary Clinton could beat the crap out of that
could be walked away from.
John McCain was just such a choice. Having had his ass kicked, the party
could blame it on the fact that he'd never been a "real" Republican, not
that Bush was a collosal failure. They also had a four year plan for Hillary
that they hoped would play well in 2012. You've seen the right wingnuts try
and work over Obama.
They'd have had a relative mountain of prepackaged garbage to throw at
Hillary - and her husband.
It would have restarted right from where it left off at the end of Bill
Clinton's second term.

Obama, however, took Hillary out but it wasn't certain right up to the
convetion.
Woopsie!
There was a real possibility then that McCain might win, but it would be
ugly.
The two were close throughout the summer but McCain hadn't played to the
Republican base during the primaries and that is when you lock in your base.
He'd been engaged from the begining in an all out effort to pick up
independents and swing voters and then Hillary's angry women. That was why
he picked Palin - he needed to lock in and motivate the Republican base that
he had previously ignored.
That's ass backwards. You need your partisancs to be your highly motivated
work force once a candidate emerges.

That was why he was chosen. Didn't you notice how suddenly the Republican
field resolved itself?
The horse race was on one day and completely off the next.

This must have been known to the Republican poobahas -- why then
was he selected. Was it his turn, like it was Bob Dole's turn?

To expand a bit on this, McCain must have know this -- why did he
make the kamikaze charge?

See above. The question, and you've stated it, is why John McCain, a real
American hero, beloved by people on both sides of the aisle, would allow
himself to be so used.
The only answer I have come up with is that once bitten by the Presidential
bug, there is no cure.
McCain wanted to reprise his loss in 2000.
He also was somewhat pleased to be able to stick a finger in George W.
Bush's eye.
The wounds of the 2000 election cycle were very deep and never completely
healed.
I don't know if you recall it but during one of the debates, McCain told
Obama that if he'd wanted to run against Bush he was 4 years late.
That was a real slap and millions of people saw it.


The United States 2008 Republican National Convention took place at the
Xcel
Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota, from September 1, through
September
4, 2008

Sarah Palin ends up on the ticket September third, 2008 (?) as next in
line
to the Presidency should McCain win.
Think about that and reflect on the likely hood that any senior Republican
not familiar with Ms Palin wouldn't have had any real trouble discerning
her
qualifications, or lack thereof, to assume the Presidency.

Treasury actively discouraged any further interest in Lehman starting
September 9, 2008 having learned that the Koreans couldn't obtain
financing
for their takeover offer. BofA was specifically warned off by Tim
Geithner,
then at the NY Fed as it's President, in spite of BofA's interest in a
deal.

Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September
15,
2008. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers is the largest bankruptcy filing
in
U.S. history with Lehman holding over $600 billion in assets.

Talk about burning the barn down to get rid of the rats!!!!!!

I'm sure they think they deserve a the gratitude of their nation. They will
settle for a chance to slip away into annonymity, or at least off the stage.
When history is written 100 years from now you will see two Presidents
blackened as you wouldn't believe.
One will be Reagan, the other GW Bush.
Neither will end up at the bottom of the best President's list. A whole new
category will be created for just these two guys.


While hindsight is 20/20, given what must have been known, how
did the senior people involved think that they could
allow/promote just *ONE* failure immediately prior to the
election without bringing the entire jury rigged structure down?

This didn't happen in a vacuum.
The "BK" was predisposed. What wasn't anticipated was the collateral
psycological trauma.
Even so, I don't think it would have altered the course of events. The
lesser of two evils was so much the lesser.

Or was this a case that they knew that things were about to
collapse, and by triggering Lehman Brothers when they did, they
blocked McCain *AND* left the Democrats a pile of armed and
ticking financial/social H bombs to worry about. That is was
this "market break" was not an "accident" at all, but an arson
fire set by a thief to cover a burglary?

What they had been doing, as a political matter on orders from on High, was
to keep the economy from becoming the BIG issue.
The steps taken were very opaque and something that the average voter didn't
understand - or care much about.
Liquiduty is easy, even huge amounts, because it's just one guy stroking a
pen. That doesn't get the same reporting that something like TARP or the
January 2008 bail out/stimulus package did, where the politics are large,
Congress has to vote, and so forth.

It appears to me that the Senior leaders in power took one look at Sarah
Palin and made a decision.
McCain/Palin never recovered.

JC