Joe Nocera, "The Tea Party, Take Two": "Nothing Like a Good Financial Crisis to Turn You Into a Liberal"

In his latest New York Times op-ed, "The Tea Party, Take Two" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/opinion/the-tea-party-take-two.html?hp), Joe Nocera describes his liberal upbringing and apologizes for accusing Tea Party Republicans of waging "jihad on the American people" in a prior column (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/the-tea-partys-war-on-america.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss). Nocera, chagrined by this earlier apoplectic attack, explains his rant:

"Then came the financial crisis. I like to joke that there’s nothing like a good financial crisis to turn you into a liberal. But it’s not really a joke. The more I learned the back story that led to the crisis, the more horrified I became. The lack of regulation and oversight of Wall Street and the big subprime companies like Countrywide, driven by the ideology of deregulation, was thoughtless and irresponsible. The refusal of bank regulators to stop subprime abuses bordered on the criminally negligent. The unwillingness of the Obama Justice Department, even now, to hold anyone to account for their role in the crisis has been disheartening."

Unlike Nocera, appellations of liberal and conservative and attributions of good and evil do not interest me, notwithstanding my liberal upbringing. More important is a path out of the abyss.

I would also observe that absent from Nocera's laundry list of factors contributing to the crisis is the decline of antitrust regulation over the course of past decades, which, under the auspices of both liberal and conservative administrations, has also wrecked havoc upon competition and the job market (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/search/label/antitrust).

Nocera gently scolds Obama for the financial crisis:

"I still think it was terribly wrong for the Republicans to use the threat of default to insist on massive spending cuts, though President Obama also deserves blame for playing his hand so poorly. Putting on my pragmatist hat again, I also think Congress could not have chosen a worse time to rein in spending. Yes, the country’s enormous debt — and the entitlement programs that are driving the federal deficit — needs to be brought under control."

Obama could have played his hand better? Oh really? When was there ever a written budget plan from the president?

"Congress could not have chosen a worse time to rein in spending"? The real question is why didn't Obama deal with the debt ceiling months earlier. Nobody has illustrated this point better, albeit humorously, than Jon Stewart (see: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-1-2011/dealageddon----a-compromise-without-revenues).

I went to sleep last night feeling ill from the week's events - the slaughter of civilians in Syria, the downing of a helicopter in Afghanistan, the tumultuous debt ceiling debate, world economic rot - not knowing of the downgrade by Standard and Poor's of US debt, which will only add to the chaos on world markets on Monday. Will Obama, now purportedly focusing his attention on jobs, be able to turn the American economy away from the shoals? Why do I lack confidence in the Procrastinator in Chief?

But perhaps we should at least be grateful that Nocera apologized for his uncivil outburst. No such remorse has been expressed by Nicholas Kristof, who recently lumped Republicans together with al-Qaeda (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2011/07/nicholas-kristofs-republicans-zealots.html). Kristof's incendiary language, protected by the First Amendment but conducive of violence, doesn't belong on the op-ed page of The New York Times.