Financial Panic

Is there a leader in the country who can address the financial panic? Who will address the causes of the nightmare?

Looking to President George W[orthless] Bush is fruitless. He is the lamest of lame ducks - even though his successor has not yet been elected.

If anyone is to restore calm to the markets, it will have to be the Presidential Candidates who have yet to get beyond platitudes, partisan attacks - aka mudslinging, and ideological accusations. We need someone to step up and tell us the truth. That is the definition of a leader.

Peggy Noonan, in her column in the Wall Street Journal (a subscription site but almost worth it just to read what she writes http://online.wsj.com/public/article/declarations.html) quotes Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) who is one of the fiercest opponents of out of control spending:

"Neither party has clean hands. Or rather, both parties have dirty hands. Here is the truth, spoken by the increasingly impressive Sen. Tom Coburn: 'The root of the problem is political greed in Congress. Members . . . from both parties wanted short-term political credit for promoting homeownership even though they were putting our entire economy at risk by encouraging people to buy homes they couldn't afford. Then, instead of conducting thorough oversight and correcting obvious problems with unstable entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, members of Congress chose to . . . distract themselves with unprecedented amounts of pork-barrel spending.' That is the truth."

Ms. Noonan goes on to say:

"Why would anyone trust either [Presidential] candidate to help dig us out of this if they can't speak frankly about what got us into it?

One had the sense this week that our entire political class is playing Frisbee on the edge of a precipice, that no one is being serious enough, honest enough, that it's all too revved, too intense, and yet too shallow."

It is hard to put it better.