Lynch

Now that Loretta Lynch has been confirmed, let's keep in mind that she was not someone deserving of widespread progressive support. From Naked Capitalism:

The background is that Lynch, as attorney for the Eastern District of New York, led the investigation of HSBC’s money laundering for drug dealers and other unsavory types that led to a $1.9 billion settlement in 2012. That deal was pilloried by both the right and left as being too lenient given the scale of HSBC’s misdeeds.

And now it turns out the great unwashed public was kept in the dark about another set of misdeeds, that of large-scale tax evasion for the wealthy, which Lynch was aware of when she was negotiating the money-laundering deal.

Elizabeth Warren, a stern critic of the HSBC settlement, did not take a stand against Lynch. So even Warren is at least somewhat compromised. In the great pigsty of American politics, everyone gets at least a little bit dirty.

From a Salon story published last year:

But what this says is that she has a long history interacting with a certain class of corporate lawyers and executives, understanding their perspective in critical ways.

That’s further buttressed by a strange detour in her legal career – serving as a director of the New York Federal Reserve Board from 2003 to 2005. Here she worked with people like former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill, ex-Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld and ex-Blackstone chairman Pete Peterson.

The directors of the New York Fed don’t play a huge role in supervising Wall Street banks or conducting monetary policy. But their biggest job is to select the president of the organization. And in 2003, Loretta Lynch had one of six votes in the appointment process that eventually put someone named Timothy Geithner in charge.

I'm disgusted with a whole buncha people right now. The list starts with Obama and includes a lot of "liberals" who turned the other way on the Lynch issue.

The list also includes your humble narrator. I'm disgusted with myself.

Why? Because I didn't feel comfortable talking about Lynch until she had a lock on the gig. If she had not gotten the job, there would have been a great deal of crowing from Republicans whose crows I would rather not hear. They didn't care that she had gone easy on HSBC and helped to make Geithner the Fed chair. Conservatives opposed her because she's black and female. Most of all, they opposed her because they did not want to give Obama an easy time on anything. Or anyone.

So once again, I -- we -- went along with Obama's irritating choice because liberals don't want to give any satisfaction to Obama's foes (who, for their part, didn't want to give any satisfaction to Obama).

That is the purpose of the GOP in modern American politics. They are the crazies who make Democratic "lite" plutocrats and neocons look good.