Bubble, Bubble, Troll and Rubble

I recently had occasion to watch The Big Short again.   And get very angry all over again.  And once again get wistful over all that I and millions like me had lost because rich monsters and arrogant too-big-to-fail institutions and corrupt rating agencies and a complicit financial media conspired to use the United State housing market as a casino where they could make whatever crazy bet they wanted to, and use house money to do it.  

While Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, dozed soundly beneath the roulette table.  (h/t Brother Charlie Pierce.)

And I was struck by how many great, good and mediocre movies and teevee shows have been made about the Great Recession.  There is the aforementioned Big Short, Queen of Versailles, Too Big To Fail and The Last Days of Lehman Brothers. 

There are movies that were "inspired by" the collapse, or set inside the Great Recession Extended Universe like Margin Call, 99 Homes and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

There are also lots of documentaries like  Inside Job, Plunder, The Flaw, Inside Lehman Brothers, Money for Nothing and Capitalism: A Love Story.

There's even a very bad action/revenge flick called Assault on Wall Street

So if you were an average person who had been asleep since the 1990s and wanted to know what in the hell actually happened to the boring, predictable, rock-solid American housing market in 2000s that nearly caused a Second Dark Age, you've got your pick of source material, from the sublime Bird and Fortune --

-- to the excellent --

-- to the "meh" --

-- to this tasteless, paint-by-numbers hackery:

Point being, if it is knowledge you seek, it's readily available, in easy-to-digest form, right there at your fingertips.

Now let's consider the other malignant bubble that nearly destroyed -- and may yet destroy -- the country.  The Republican Party.  Which, if you ponder on it for a minute, has a lot in common with the housing crisis.  

Specifically, the GOP is to American politics what Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were to the housing market before the housing market went tits up.  

First, there was a general, unspoken understanding among inside players that a certain percentage of the Republican Party base was, uh, problematic, to say the least. Bigots, imbeciles, lunatics, grifters, gun nuts, homophobes, etc.

Second, it turns out that the political equivalent of the ratings agencies -- the mainstream media -- who were supposed to be the system's impartial arbiters and referees had zero incentive to actually look under the GOP's hood and see what madness was boiling right below the surface.  Quite the contrary, the media had every financial and professional incentive to continue the mark the GOP as a rock-solid, AAA  political party decades after the underlying elements of the party -- the base and the Conservative media and key GOP leaders and all of the Very Serious People with important jobs at major newspapers and teevee networks -- had gone to shit.

Nobody in the media was was going to nuke their reputation or risk all that insider access by siding with those America-hating, terrorist-loving Libtards who were jumping up and down screaming that something had gone very, very wrong with the GOP. That it was getting exponentially worse because the underlying individual political currency on which the media should have been rating the Republican party -- Republican voters -- was completely toxic.

And once the GOP's internal rot became too putrid to hide, the political ratings agencies simply switched from pretending that the GOP was doing just fine to pretending that, no matter how fucked-in-the-head the GOP might be, there was no better place to invest your vote.  

After all, don't all the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market agree that Democrats are somehow always just as bad.  Probably even worse!  So if you were freaked out by what's happening in the GOP, really the only sensible and serious alternative was for you to take your vote and invest in exotic Third Party vaporware.   Maybe Evan McMullin!  Or David French.  Or just write in "Ronald Reagan" which will not only give you a nice, warm, self-righteous glow but which, by some alchemy that the average human could not understand, will something something Disrupt the K'rupt Duopoly fer sure!

Then this happened.

And you know the rest.

But you know what?  It all ended kinda like the housing crisis ended too, didn't it?

The corrupt rating agencies -- the mainstream media -- are still pretty much intact, with all the same hacks and quislings still employed at all the same jobs.

The dogshit GOP -- who are still packed to the rafters with the same bigots and imbeciles and lunatics that have always been there -- is still intact, still being treated as a serious political party by the corrupt rating agencies.

The cynical rage and hate brokers -- the men who fucking well knew the base was insane and continued to work to bundle them up in order to get GOP scum elected -- have, by and large, done pretty well too.  Some of them are still with the old firm and still getting paid.  Others -- like the Never Trumpers who got run out of the party -- just set up shop across the street, selling "OMG Can You Believe How Fucking Crazy The Post-Trump GOP Has Become!!!" stock to eager buyers in the mainstream media.

And nowhere except in what little remains of the Liberal blogosphere, or on a few Liberal podcasts here and there, will you hear anyone breaking down the long-term, underlying causes of the implosion of the GOP the way all those movies explained the implosion of the housing market.  

No Academy Award nominated films.

No films "inspired" by the actual history of the modern Republican party.  

No documentaries.

Not even any shitty action/revenge flicks.  

Because the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market still still believe the Republican Party must be propped up by wishful thinking and fairy tales at any cost.  

Because the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market still regard that monstrous, corrupt, deranged institution that is still quite capable of taking down the entire country as Too Big to Fail. 

No Fair Remembering Stuff