Arguments with dining room tables, vol. XXIX

Chuck Grassley shows why it is impossible to stifle the voice of America's furniture.

The SEC porn story

I wondered about this when I saw the headlines this morning. Aren't Republicans just calling attention to a useless (and apparently horny) SEC when it was working under Republican's watch?

The latest details on the inspector general's probe of on-hours porn-watching inside the SEC are certainly not old news -- they come, as my colleague Ed O'Keefe reports, after a request for a summary from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).

Dozens of Securities and Exchange Commission staffers used government computers to access and download explicit images and many of the incidents have occurred since the global financial meltdown began, according to a new watchdog investigation.

But Marian Wang points out that we've known about this for some time.

We pointed out the porn problem in a semiannual report from April 1, 2008, through Sept. 30, 2008 (PDF). ABC News pointed out similar findings in a report from Oct. 1, 2008, through March 31, 2009 (PDF). Similar reports on porn surfing within the SEC were reported in February, first by The Washington Times then blogged by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News and The Huffington Post, and later picked up by Gawker.

The difference now, as Wang points out, is that Republicans -- Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) -- are pouncing on the story to make an argument against financial reform legislation. This strikes me as politically wise and logically garbled -- the SEC, in the period covered by this investigation, was a mess at many other levels (go read Andrew Ross Sorkin on then-Chairman Chris Cox's fumbles during the 2008 meltdown), so why attack its old behavior instead of reforming it?

Well, that's easy. They are not interested in "reforming" the SEC. They are interested in making headlines. They are interested in defanging the SEC through humiliation, not strengthening it by allowing a Democratic administration to hire people better able and willing to police Wall Street. Just as Republican leadership is calling "a bailout" financial reform that would put a mechanism in place for putting large financial institutions our of business in an orderly fashion, the charges don't have to bear any relation to, um, the current reality.

Our financial watchdogs were surfing porn because they were bored, having very little to do during the Bush administration. The fact that Grassley and Issa are now outraged by this is yet another episode of Cynicism and Political Opportunism. Thanks for watching. Turn in next time -- same batshit time, same batshit channel.

The vast rightwing...

But you knew this.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

It is encouraging that the New York Times recognizes this and is calling bullshit on it. But as long as the Chuck Grassley's of the world are considered Very Serious People, then real reform is doomed.