Common sense missing in Obama bailout

Miami Herald - By GLENN GARVIN - Tuesday, 02.24.09

There's a reason that English is the most widely spoken language on the planet: It's the most highly adaptable, capable of evolving to meet new needs in the blink of an eye. For example: Just last year, offering mortgages at a cheaper-than-market teaser interest rate with little or no money down was known as ''predatory lending.'' But conditions changed -- specifically, the party occupying the White House -- and now we call that style of lending ``national policy.''
The new definition was provided by Predator-in-Chief Barack Obama last week while making his daily announcement of a new bailout plan, this one for homeowners who took on mortgages they can't afford during banking's go-go days earlier this decade. Offering them cheaper new terms on their loans -- at taxpayer expense, of course -- will help us bolster ''those core values of common sense and responsibility, those are the values that have defined this nation,'' Obama said.
Only churlish Language Nazis would quibble with those bold new definitions of common sense and responsibility, much less note the extraordinary resemblance between Obama's mortgage-lending practices and those of the reptilian bankers he denounced so often during his presidential campaign:
• Down payments? We don't need no stinking down payments! Just like the bankers, who lured customers with deals that required no money upfront (at the height of the mortgage boom in 2005, (continues here...)