The Nation's Chris Hayes filled in for Ed Schultz and did a good job of calling for everyone who is sick to death of business as usual in Washington D.C. to be demanding better leadership from our elected officials when our country is in crisis.
HAYES: House Minority Leader John Boehner unleashed a torrent of attacks on President Obama and the Democrats in an interview with "The Pittsburgh Tribune Review" yesterday. He also explained why Tea Party nation is so angry at the majority party. Boehner said, quote, "They are snuffing out America that I grew up in. Right now we’ve got more Americans engaged in their government than at any time in our history. There’s a political rebellion brewing, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since 1776."
Boehner went on to rail against what the - what he calls Obamacare and promised to repeal the law, if he gets his hand on the speaker’s gavel. Boehner criticized the president for overreacting to the oil spill in the gulf because of his moratorium on deepwater drilling. Minority leader also thinks Congress overreached when House and Senate negotiators reached a tentative deal on financial reform. Boehner said, quote, "This is killing an ant with a nuclear weapon", end quote.
Now, Boehner isn’t alone in attempting to minimize the financial crisis. Fact of the matter is as soon as the bankers and the big shots were in the clear, when the bonuses started flowing on Wall Street and politicians could hit their fund-raising goals again, the establishment suddenly lost that sense of panicked urgency they had when in the fall of 2008 it looked like the entire crown jewel of American capitalism was swirling around the drain.
Let’s keep this in perspective. The baroque Ponzi scheme in which Wall Street engaged precipitated a recession that has, as I speak to you right now, left eight million people without jobs, 8.4 million people without jobs, three million homes foreclosed on, and as of 2008 at least a million more people living in poverty. And just today scared consumers are raising more worries of a double-dip recession.
The folks that number among those millions don’t think this recession is just an ant or a bump in the road. For them, it is an existential crisis, the death of life dreams. For John Boehner and so many of his colleagues this doesn’t amount to that big a deal because it’s not their ox being gored. I live in Washington which has one of the strongest regional economies in the country, and I can tell you the boom times are back.
The only way to wake the American elite establishment out of its complacency about the slow motion disaster of the great recession is for the people getting hammered by it to organize and to interrupt this ruling class idol, to remind the people in power that the crisis isn’t over and the real danger isn’t overreaction, it is the sin of forgetting, the threat of failing to use this moment to fix a dangerously broken economy.
Amen brother. Chris has done a good job with filling in for Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz even if he is maybe a little stiff in front of the camera when he's hosting a show rather than being just a guest. It would not break my heart if MSNBC was prepping him for a spot in their daily lineup. He's an excellent writer and on the right side of the issues for progressives. He'll get better in front of the camera if given a chance IMHO.
Lawrence O'Donnell is going to get an evening spot on MSNBC. I would love to see Hayes replace any of the news models that make up the majority of their daytime coverage.