Talking Points cites Nancy Pelosi blaming the Bush administration not only for the Wall Street meltdown but for seeing it coming and doing nothing until the very day before, and even for actively barring officials from informing Congress of the imminent catastrophe.
I don’t doubt the assertions. It would be entirely in character for the Bush administration to do so. Sequestering vital information, especially bad news, on general principle. A refusal to acknowledge a problem exists at all, rather than open the question of how the administration may have contributed to the problem. Putting politics before the most rudimentary duties of office. Risking catastrophe for the nation as a whole to protect the interests of the very wealthy. Valuing obedience and personal loyalty to principle and national loyalty. The scenario Pelosi paints would be so typical of the Bush administration that the burden of proof in this case very nearly shifts to the negative.
Nevertheless, I would like some kind of corroborating evidence, or at least corroborative claims from another party. Pelosi has her own history of helping to hide the Bush administration’s skeletons, notably in visiting Guantanamo. When news of torture and other systemic improprieties got out, she blamed her silence on the Bush administration, too, complaining that she had been sworn to secrecy as a condition of performing her duty of oversight. And rather than call anyone out on that kind of oversight-without-accountability, she went right along with it, right up to the point where she began taking flak for her tacit approval. Then the vow of secrecy was off. And now a Democratic Congress—unfairly, I think—is taking flak for its tacit approval of how business was done pre-meltdown, and Pelosi is claiming once again to be cut from the loop.
In short, Pelosi’s claims are quite probably a true story, but they’re unlikely to be the whole story, and the accuser is no more reliable nor disinterested a witness than the accused.
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