The Billionaires Wing of the Democratic Party

The Billionaire Wing of the Democratic Party

Michelle Malkin discusses the Saturday Night Live skit about the bailout that mentions a real-life couple--the Sandlers--whose sale of Golden West Financial to Wachovia a couple of years back played a major part in sinking Wachovia:

Over the weekend, I watched a hilarious, dead-on, and surprisingly honest skit on Saturday Night Live about the craptastic bailout and its Democrat roots. The skit called out Fannie/Freddie and featured Nancy Pelosi dragging out various sob-story “victims” — who turned out to be a parade of deadbeats and schemers. I was going to post the video for you tonight, but I can’t.
The video has been pulled. Vanished into thin air. (Go here for full transcript and screenshots.)
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One of the rapacious couples featured in the skit was Herbert and Marion Sandler (portrayed by Darrell Hammond and Casey Wilson). Unlike the other composite figures, the Sandlers are a real-life couple.
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As Todd Thurman at Heritage notes, the Sandlers are left-wing moguls who built “a mortgage company whose major product was subprime mortgages and they sold it to Wachovia for $24.2 billion in 2006. And what do the Sandlers do when they are not peddling subprime garbage? They are busy writing checks to leftist groups like the Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Yes that ACORN.”
The Sandlers are seething over the skit. And George Soros must be livid as well. Anyone else smell a legal threat behind the disappearance of the vid?

Michelle also links to Ed Lasky at American Thinker explaining what happened:

Herbert and Marion Sandler, a New York lawyer and Wall Street analyst respectively, bought a small California thrift in 1963 and built it into GDW — one of the largest thrifts in the nation. The company’s business was built on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs. These were mortgages offered at low “teaser” rates that ratcheted upward as interest rates increased. They were often sold aggressively to unsophisticated home buyers who did not comprehend the vast financial risks they were taking, or who assumed that housing prices would rise high enough to provide a profit to them when they sold their houses. They were targets for lenders peddling mortgages that should have been stamped with a skull and crossbones, for these were among the most seductive and dangerous types of mortgage.

The Sandlers personally made $2.4 billion on this sale. You can see why they are backing the hard left end of the Democratic Party.

Part of why we tend to bounce back and forth between Republicans and Democrats in this country is that Republicans create an environment in which people can become wealthy. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--but it also means that obscene wealth gets created. When that happens, the obscenely rich fund left-wing causes such as MoveOn.org, ACORN, and the rest of the hard left end of the Democratic Party. A few years of the financial manipulators and speculators who are at the core of the Democratic Party being in charge, and enough of that wealth is destroyed (or snorted up the noses of the obscenely rich) for Republicans to get back in control.

UPDATE: Here's the skit, copied elsewhere. It is actually quite funny, and in a parody sort of way, surprisingly accurate. Here's a Wall Street Journal article of October 2, 2008, with embarrassing quotes that provide a factual basis for the skit. If facts mattered, this would be a major defeat for the Democratic Party, and those Republicans who were stupid enough to go along with this insane bailout. But facts really don't matter to many voters.