Few politicians combine ignorance, obstinate self-righteousness, racial demagoguery, and extremism quite as perfectly as the congresswoman from South Central now poised to become a major force shaping federal banking policy.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a longtime cheerleader for Fidel Castro, was only too happy to use the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a political advertisement. She viewed the 53 deaths, thousands of injuries, and $1 billion in property damage as a shining example of participatory democracy. The word riot never escaped her lips. She called the unrest a "rebellion" and "a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration."
Waters then blamed the violence on Republican tax cuts. "The Reagan-Bush administrations have taken away programs that have been very helpful, very empowering," she told CBS News. "In addition to that, the recession and the tax policies that are allowed for the exportation of jobs to Third World countries for cheap labor—all have caused us to come to the point where we are today—desperation, hopelessness. I lay the blame squarely at the foot of Bush and Reagan."
With a straight face Waters has accused the CIA of encouraging drug use in the inner cities in order to hurt black Americans.
"She is one of the most self-serving, hate-filled, race-obsessed politicians in America," says columnist Michelle Malkin. "The Democratic Party doesn't just embrace her. It kneels at her feet."
Waters is next in line to take over on the minority side of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.
Barney Frank, the thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, is leaving Congress, freeing up the top Democratic post on the committee.
Frank's surprise announcement that he won't seek another term clears the way for another thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, the scandal-plagued Waters of California, to become ranking Democrat on the panel.
It remains to be seen whether the change in the Democratic lineup on the committee that oversees the banking industry will make any difference at all in the day-to-day operations of the panel. In the event Democrats retake the House in the 2012 elections, a possibility that currently seems unlikely, as committee chairman Waters would offer much of the same as Frank offered.
The difference is largely in style. Frank is an intelligent, occasionally witty spokesman for socialism but he is also haughty and arrogant. When I interviewed him in his Capitol Hill office in 2005, the entire time he remained seated at his desk holding his morning newspaper while talking to me. A few times he lowered it slightly so he could scold and lecture me for daring to asking questions he deemed dumb.
Waters is simply an angry thug who could never be accused of thoughtfulness. Waters is Wanda Sykes without a sense of humor.
Both Frank and Waters were content in the decade-long run-up to the mortgage market collapse to pretend nothing was wrong even as signs that a huge bubble was about to burst became impossible to ignore.
