Today Ben Bernanke and his buddies testified before the Senate Banking Committee and tried to defend the indefensible: the Fed role in pulling Bear Stearns' chestnuts out of the fire of financial disaster that Bear Stearns and other Wall Street Bushite firms caused by their greed in the sub-prime mortgage bundling market, aided and abetted by the no effective regulations of their protector, the Bush administration.  Of course, just like Reagan's supply side mess including the savings and loan debacle, taxpayers' and borrowed money are cleaning up another Republican mess

Bernanke and his sidekicks' distorted and less than believable testimonies were, as usual, defended by Republican members of the committee like Senator Robert P. Corker of Tennessee who was embarrassing himself fawning and spinning inanities.

Leave it to the inimitable Julian Delasantellis to explain what Bear Stearns and all the other Wall Streeters of their ilk did to help cause this financial catastrophe for which Republicans like Senator Corker want to cover up and spin the lie that it was just a few bad apples. (How many times have Bushites trotted out that well worn explanation for the countless Bush administration scandals, crimes, and corruption?)

Delasantellis writes: "...just continually calling it the "subprime crisis" fails to illustrate the real problem - what happened to the subprime mortgage paper when it got eaten by Wall Street's gaping maw, then expelled out the Street's backside and then sold to the investment world as fresh candy."

The NY Times editorial hits the nail on the head by repeating what many progressives have been saying for quite a while: "To understand the White House’s blueprint for regulating the financial markets, start with what the Bush administration did not do. It did not offer America a plan to respond to the ongoing credit crisis or to the Federal Reserve’s dramatic intervention to prevent the collapse of Bear Stearns. It certainly did not provide a roadmap for avoiding this sort of meltdown in the future.

"The Fed’s role in the Bear debacle has put taxpayers at risk of having to shoulder big losses, but the administration’s so-called regulatory reform does not address what the Bear mess made obvious: if something goes badly wrong in under-regulated or unregulated corners of the financial markets, it could topple the whole system.

"The message of the administration’s proposals is that the markets will — and should — return to where they were before the near-collapse of Bear Stearns." (Underline added.)

"Its proposals are premised on the notion that market discipline is the most effective tool to limit risks to the financial system. Current events show how absurd that is. Discipline was utterly lacking as today’s problems were being created. In the absence of rules — and regulators who are willing and empowered to enforce them — market discipline is a fantasy.

"It’s probably useless to hope for anything better from Bush administration officials. They are complicit in the credit crisis because the anti-regulatory ethos and practices of the administration fostered the conditions for the debacle. It’s difficult to solve problems of one’s own making and impossible to respond effectively if you don’t first face up to your role in causing them. The administration apparently prefers to perpetuate the myth of self-policing, self-correcting global free markets, rather than own up to the fatal flaws that are now so evident in that myth."  (Underline added.)

When will Democrats in Congress, the main stream media, and the naive and myopic among the American electorate finally realize that, given the track record of the Bush administration, anyone associated with this horrible administration, including Dubya's consistently incompetent and/or complicit in scandal, corruption, and crime appointees, cannot be trusted and have no integrity.

This is the worst administration ever and, just as with Reagan's administration, the Democrats will have to clean up after the elephants' messes and disasters, again.