The Line: Reax to Perry’s Threat to Lynch Fed Chairman

  • Rick Perry on Fed Chairman Paul Bernanke: “I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas”
  • James Fallows: “If Bernanke ‘prints money’ in the next 15 months, toward the end of forestalling a recession or preserving jobs, Perry would consider that ‘almost treasonous.’ This is the kind of thing you just don’t hear from national-level politicians, and for a reason. (For starters: the punishment for treason is death.) Obama looks better the more the Republican field displays its outlook and temperament. Romney looks better the more the anyone-but-Romney alternatives come into full view.”
  • Former Bush operative Tony Fratto on Twitter: “Gov. Perry’s comments about Chmn. Bernanke are inappropriate and unpresidential.”
  • Bushite Texan Karl Rove: “You don’t accuse the chairman of the federal reserve of being a traitor to his country. Of being guilty of treason,” Karl Rove told Fox News Tuesday. “And, suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in Texas. You know, that is not, again a presidential statement.”
  • James Galbraith, an economist and professor at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs: “The fact that Rick Perry says something does not necessarily mean that he’s wrong, and that the institution has conducted itself in an impeccable way. The Fed allowed a great overstatement of its powers to become conventional wisdom. It pretended that [Quantitative Easing] QE1 and QE2 would achieve something substantial in the economy, when in fact it couldn’t.”
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates: “It’s almost as if Obama has this mutant power to compel these guys into charging, full steam, into a wall of spikes.”
  • Pres. Obama: “I think that everybody who runs for president, it probably takes them a little bit of time before they start realizing that this isn’t like running for governor or running for senator or running for Congress, and you’ve got to be a little more careful about what you say,” Obama said. “But I’ll cut him some slack. He’s only been at it for a few days now.”
  • Andrew Sullivan: “To my mind, [this] statement disqualifies Perry from the race.”
  • Neo-con Jon Podhoretz: “In the early going on Twitter, I suggested the harrumphers were knowingly making a mountain out of a molehill to bring him down a notch. I was wrong. He’s trying to be the next president, and he needs to be judged on that standard. What Perry did was make a thoughtless blunder, an unforced error; we’re now going to spend a couple of days discussing whether he was summoning violence on Ben Bernanke’s head or not, which is of absolutely no use to Perry. He is, or was, moments away from becoming the race’s frontrunner, and what is in his interest is to harness the excitement of his late entry with qualities of leadership and control that will rally the majority of Republicans unhappy with the choices facing them to his side. Rick Perry made that more difficult today; this was a serious rookie mistake on the national stage”
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2 thoughts on “The Line: Reax to Perry’s Threat to Lynch Fed Chairman”

  1. The fed IS the problem and needs to be dealt with. Quit sucking the teet of the private bank Jon, everyone who knows anything of the fed, know that what they’re doing is what IS ruining our economy. You can’t plan an economy and or much of anything.

    Jon Ponder, lapdog of the state and the establishment.

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