The Doddering Senator Chris Dodd

Yogi Bera said when you come to a fork in the road you take it.  It seems as though in the case of Dodd, he’s avoiding that fork altogether and simply running away.

One of the almost criminal acts of this Democratic Congress is their failure to investigate the “special deals” that politicians like Dodd recieved before the housing bubble popped.

Dodd was the head of the Senate Banking Committee which oversaw, among other financial institutions, Countrywide Financial, since defunct and abosrded by another lending institution.  Dodd recieved two loans (one on his house in Connecticut the other on one in Washington, D.C.) for 4.25% and 4.5% (a rate few could obtain).  We call that putting the rooster in charge of the hen house and definitely a conflict of interest.

According to a story from Investor’s Business Daily, Sen. Dodd also owned a house in Ireland that was worth 300% more than what he said it was worth on government financial forms:

The Hartford Courant recently reported on a cottage in Ireland in which Dodd has an interest. A new appraisal ordered by Dodd placed its value at $658,000.  Problem is, that’s roughly three times what Dodd had been listing on his financial disclosure forms . The penalty for filing false financial disclosure forms is $50,000 and up to one year in prison.

Furthermore, Dodd’s acquisition of his Irish cottage is laced with intrigue and more than the appearance of guilt:

As Rennie outlines, Dodd became part owner of the 10-acre Galway property in 1994 along with Missouri businessman William Kessinger, whom Dodd knew through investor Edward R. Downe Jnr, who had pleaded guilty the previous year to insider trading charges. The mortgage was listed as “between $100,001 and $250,000?.  Downe was a witness to Kessinger’s purchase.

In 2001, Dodd circumvented the US Justice Department to help get his pal Downe a full pardon on President Bill Clinton’s last day in office.  The following year, Dodd bought off Kessinger’s two-thirds share of the “cottage” for, Dodd said, $127,000.

During John McCain’s run for the White House he was mocked because he couldn’t recall how many homes he owned.

Better than owning homes, lying about their value, obtaining them through less than clear means, and getting sweetheart deals on your loans from one of the companies you are supposedly in charge of overseeing though, right?

To make this comedy of errors even funnier, Dodd was helping to re-write financial “reform” laws:

Sen. Christopher Dodd’s decision this week to pack his congressional bags at the end of this year rather than face the strong prospect of defeat at the ballot box has sparked speculation over the fate of the massive Wall Street regulation bill that he is overseeing and his future after Capitol Hill.

Dodd’s idea of “financial reform” was creating yet another government agency to handle risk management and banking regulation.  Mind you, this comes from the same man who helped require banks to extend loans to those unqualified to recieve them, a move which helped over-heat the economy and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars to be lost with no word on how much more it’s going to take.

Dodd deserves to lose his re-election bid… the only problem is he’ll never have to face the political gallows because he’s not going to run again.  Perhaps he knows he’ll be held accountable for things he’s done to the country?