The lies, in detail

'At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030502951.html

Charles Krauthammer is a class act. Beautiful, elegant prose, and a fine forensic mind. And of course he agrees with me. He has turned my generalised thesis into perfectly formed specifics. When I said that underneath Obamas honeyed words were lies, this is what I meant.

Whether Americas great lumpen proletariat will heave themselves off their sofas for long enough to forestall this enormous transformation of their society remains to be seen. If only it were a nation of Krauthammers...