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Soft Core

Eileene alerted me to a blogger’s comment on SEC employees busy looking at porn while Wall Street collapsed towards the end of 2008. My immediate reaction was that, hey, their bosses weren’t allowing them to pursue their duties anyway… I was not alone in that thought. The blogger expressed much the same sentiment, and even the CNN article hints at it; certainly the comments attached below the CNN article repeat it.

Uncharacteristically, those comments are more interesting, informative, and insightful than the article. (I love the comment on the symbolic irony of masturbation causing blindness.) There’s still the usual selection of knee-jerk partisan jackasses, including a few who try to pin this on Obama somehow. Ignoring inconvenient facts like dates gets easier with practice, I’m told. But they are outnumbered by posters making the effort to check the dates, and to correct such idiocy, and most of these manage to do so without diving into equally crazy left-wing rants. In doing so, they bring two other curious date-related observations to light:

First, that this is old news. Two years old. The original report came out late in 2008, and only now is CNN getting around to it. Second, that CNN released this story on the same day that President Obama delivered a speech launching his initiative to give the SEC more powerful tools for regulating Wall Street. You could spin that into theories of a vast, right-wing conspiracy, if that’s your thing. Or you could eschew conspiracy theory and merely add it to a list of conservative bias exhibited in our dwindling sources of independent news, if that’s your thing. Or you could pooh-pooh complaints of conservative bias in our news services, portraying them as paranoid thinking, if that’s your thing. What you can’t do is look at the story and continue to complain of a vast, concerted liberal bias in our news services.

Well, I suppose you can. Technically. But only by throwing in with the fact-free jackasses trying to blame this all on the socialist in the White House, somehow.

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