Click the image for the full story from McClatchy. It all happened over a day and a half in September 2002. I hope I’m still getting traffic from MDE today because I doubt very much the talk radio insurrectionists or Fox News liars will touch this story and it would be nice if the local wingnuts had a clue how utterly indifferent Bush-Cheney were to America’s best interests.

We bought the noncombatant Uighurs from Afghan bounty hunters to pad our captured terrorist count, held them prisoner in violation of any kind of international law, and then allowed the fucking RED CHINESE to come to our base to “question” them while we held them down.

If I had a house full of scabby Chinese-made, Wal-Mart purchased crap, I’d be pretty fucking proud right now, yessirree.

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Rubbing salt into wingnut wounds, Paul Krugman explains how Goldman Sachs gamed the system and is poised to hand out another billion or so of your pension money to their thieving employees as bonuses.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. Other banks invested heavily in the same toxic waste they were selling to the public at large. Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

This is the world for which I wrote 7,000 resumes. The migration of money from workers to parasites was obvious, even to me. I wrote hundreds of resumes for people who made six-figure incomes and they were the most curious of all my clients. A bifurcated group, they included the most predatory and selfish people I worked with, and some of the most cluelessly insular folks.

The latter group came back later as they were among the first to get axed, but they played an important role in all of this. The wolves didn’t take over the brokerages and corporations by merit. No, they shoved aside the incompetent second- and third-generation business leaders and replaced traditional business practices with the kind of shit that only happens in frontier towns.

There’s been no law in Dodge (Wall Street) since St. Ronnie of Don’t Walk Away did his prediapered damage to the rulebooks.

And still the base plays on. Incredible, but less so once you realize they live in a bubble where Krugman is dismissed unread twice a week and McClatchy is a name never dropped. Grad students looking for an asskicking project might consider teaming up to monitor Fox for a few months. Make a log of the stories they cover then write a paper about all the stories they don’t cover.

That would be a study worth reading. Democrats need to inject those stories into the news flow, whether Fox likes it or not. The Republican base can’t be saved from itself so long as it only knows half the story.

Wingnuts don’t hate America, not the America they believe in. The problem is they don’t know America half as well as they think they do. We need to bring them up to speed.

I thought about this a lot last night, mostly in the context of the Sotomayor kabuki. Republicans on the smiling attack, Democrats buffering with anecdotal relief. We’re not doing it right.

Instead of approaching nominees (issues) empirically, everything is viewed through ideological lenses that distort the process (problem solving). Instead of piercing questions about judicial philosophy we got gotchas and homilies. Republican agitprop in a banal sea of Perry Mason reminiscing. Dems and ‘pugs switching places on the dance floor but the same tunes as played during Alito and Roberts’ hearings. Sunny faces illuminating nothing as accusatory tones spoke of base intent.

Obama has given the Republicans every opportunity to break from this pattern. Judge Sotomayor was the most conservative Democratic nominee imaginable, well to the right of the Orin Hatch selected Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And the rabid, ill-informed Republican base was whipped up into a frenzy over a casual phrase from an otherwise forgotten speech.

Years ago I began expressing the hope that the Internet would prove to be Radio Free America. For the left, it has been. For the right, it’s been all about firewalls and insularity. The left has grown stronger because we’ve used the net to become better informed. The right has used it in klangbird fashion, becoming even more so.

Another blog recently commented on the phenomenon of wingnut links. The MDE link to me the other day was a rare thing. Wingnut links usually only link to wingnut sources. At least one MDE reader thought “one” of my posts was a week of posting. Length, in part, but I think the link deluge scared them more than a little.

Information is terrifying stuff if you’re used to getting the truth in homeopathic doses.

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One story every wingnut will read about this weekend is that of Dustin Britton, the six-foot Coloradan who saved his wife and toddlers from a starving mountain lion. Britton was cutting wood for their campsite when the mountain lion attacked him. Fortunately, he was operating a chain saw and fended the cat off.

This is the world wingnuts want to live in, not the world their leaders have created, the world in which some smarmy sumbitch on Wall Street blew their pension fund on risky investments that resulted in bonuses for the accounting clerks while the investors went home with bupkus.

Maybe one of these days we’ll get to read a story about a man who lost everything and then went to Wall Street with a chain saw.

I would buy a newspaper to read that story.

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Errands call, so that’s it for now.