Ramblin' Man

“Lord, I was born a ramblin' man,
Tryin to make a livin and doin the best I can.
And when it's time for leavin',
I hope you'll understand,
That I was born a ramblin' man.” Dickey Betts

Last Friday, John McCain gave us some of his patented “straight talk.” Straight talk? The mind boggles at the number of stops and starts and twists and curves from the ramblin’ mind of John McCain.

From Transcript of presidential debate:

McCain: Sure. But -- but let me -- let me point out, I also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and warned about corporate greed and excess, and CEO pay, and all that. A lot of us saw this train wreck coming.

But there's also the issue of responsibility. You've mentioned President Dwight David Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, on the night before the Normandy invasion, went into his room, and he wrote out two letters.

One of them was a letter congratulating the great members of the military and allies that had conducted and succeeded in the greatest invasion in history, still to this day, and forever.

And he wrote out another letter, and that was a letter of resignation from the United States Army for the failure of the landings at Normandy.

Somehow we've lost that accountability. I've been heavily criticized because I called for the resignation of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We've got to start also holding people accountable, and we've got to reward people who succeed.

But somehow in Washington today -- and I'm afraid on Wall Street -- greed is rewarded, excess is rewarded, and corruption -- or certainly failure to carry out our responsibility is rewarded.

As president of the United States, people are going to be held accountable in my administration. And I promise you that that will happen.

I agree with the accountability part. I’ll start by holding McCain partially responsible for all of the problems we now face. I won’t be voting for him in November.

He actually said that he would fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, not call for his resignation. But, that’s a minor quibble. What I don’t understand is the logic of this. The SEC regulates the stock market. Does McCain think that short selling is the only cause of everything that is wrong? I suppose that the SEC could have banned short selling earlier than they did (after first saying it was OK in 2007), however Congress could have written a law banning short selling, period. (I’m not saying they should, just that they could have.) McCain supported The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (Many say this is a contributing factor to the sub-prime mortgage melt-down), but didn’t vote on it. (He was too busy campaigning. “Country First” and all of that, you know.) Should McCain fire himself?

What does short-selling have to do with mortgage loans and the current credit crisis? Wouldn’t threatening the head of the Office of Thrift Supervision make more sense? Or maybe the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency? Or the head of the United States Department of the Treasury? Or the head of the Federal Reserve? Since these organizations deal with banks and mortgages, these threats make more sense to me than threatening the head of the SEC. One of the purposes of the Federal Reserve is "To address the problem of banking panics." How's Ben been doing with that?

I do believe McCain was correct when he said he doesn’t know much about the economy. I also believe he doesn’t know much about the United States government.

Update:
I have left out a lot of the details concerning short selling. What is meant by short selling can be confusing. It becomes more confusing when put into the context of the current financial situation. The confusion is multiplied even more when the politicians start talking about it. For some clarification you could read Short (finance) and Uptick rule.