Herman Cain: Typical Republican Hypocrite

   it seems that the Teabagger Party still does not quite understand that the voting records of all of our elected officials can easily be looked up on the Internet, or they just simply have memory lapses when it comes to their darling critters running for the highest office.

   The Tea Party dislikes the TARP ( bailouts ) idea, but they love one of the candidates who supported it. Their current darling is one Herman Cain, asshat from Florida. He supported Bush’s TARP, as did Romney and Perry, and they are all three of them trying to get their followers to not remember that.

Jed Lewison          Fri Oct 07, 2011

Here's the story tea party Republicans like to tell: infuriated with the TARP bank bailouts (passed in 2008 during the Bush administration), tea partiers decided to take control of their party from establishment politicians and replace them with true conservative outsiders. You know, guys like Herman Cain.

The only problem is that back in 2008, guys like Herman Cain were the exact same establishment figures telling Republicans why they should support the bailouts.

Here's Cain in October, 2008:

Far from Nationalization, Purchase of Bank Stocks Is a Win-Win for Taxpayers

Earth to taxpayers! Owning stocks in banks is not nationalization of the banking industry. It’s trying to solve a problem.

The unprecedented financial crisis has caused the Treasury of the United States to take unprecedented measures to help solve the problem of frozen credit and cash flow for U.S. businesses.

Now Cain tries to spin his support by saying that it's the implementation that he didn't like, not the program, and that he warned people it could go wrong. But this is what he said back then:

These actions by the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank and the actions by the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation (FDIC) are all intended to help solve an unprecedented financial crisis. Unlike steps taken prior to and during the Great Depression, these actions have a high probability of success.

In order for these collective actions to work, the media needs to calm its crisis rhetoric, and Congress needs to just shut up with its political rhetoric.

Now don’t tell Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, but if this works, and I believe it will, the Bush Administration will have gotten this one right.

And he still makes the case that bailouts were a good idea—just that they were expected incorrectly.

Of course, it's not like today's Republican primary voters have any great options if they don't want to be complete hypocrites on their "fundamental opposition" to the TARP bailouts. Mitt Romney was a big supporter, and even though Rick Perry didn't specifically mention the word bailouts, he did urge Congress to pass an economic rescue package at the same time that it was voting on TARP. At the time, everybody took his words to be an endorsement of TARP, and he didn't push back until long after they became unpopular.

So that leaves Republicans with either Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul—if they want to be consistent. Or they can listen to what Herman Cain told them to do in 2008, and just shut up.

Originally posted to The Jed Report on Fri Oct 07, 2011

Also republished by Daily Kos.

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