Fans of presidential history from long ago will recall the plaque on Harry S. Truman's Oval Office desk that read, “The buck stops here.” Ol' Chrissie must not have one of those.
Fans of presidential history from not-so-long go will recall that the doomed nominee from Cox's own doomed party called for Cox's head. Ol' Chrissie must've heard that.
But here's what TheStreet.com's Glenn Hall made of Cox's harangue:
In what other media have called a “stunning rebuke,” Cox ordered an internal investigation to find out why his staff attorneys failed to investigate Bernard Madoff's operations despite seeing so many red flags over the past decade.
Frankly, I'm not so stunned. It would be welcome sign if not for the fact that Cox is putting all the blame on his staff and taking none for himself. Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black? Who runs that agency? Doesn't the buck stop there?
There's that buck again. Hall goes on to remind “that under Cox's leadership, the SEC became infamous for looking the other way while Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and countless other banks made a mockery of the securities industry with their crazy plays on mortgages.”
If you think Hall is piling on, think again.
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He made the same point in a post titled Chris Cox is a Punk that appeared BEFORE the Madoff scandal became public.
Our do-nothing SEC boss, Chris Cox, has some nerve calling for a bailout exit strategy.
This is the guy whose utter failure to govern the creation of nearly
fictional derivatives of derivatives of derivatives of mortgage-backed
derivatives got us into this mess.
Later:
I just can't take the hypocrisy. If Cox had been doing his job the last three years, there wouldn't be a need for a bailout.
Hall went on to use Cox's ineptitude to take a swipe at our fair county.
But let's not forget that Cox hails from Orange County, Calif. — the
place that practically invented subprime mortgages and hyper-housing
inflation.
Ouch!
A New York Times editorial today
also questioned Cox's job performance, noting, “the agency's chairman,
Christopher Cox, assured investors nine months ago that all was well at
Bear Stearns. It collapsed three days later.”
Criticism is also coming much closer to home–indeed, within Cox's old congressional district. Open the home page to ElToroNow.com,
the website that is still pushing for an international airport where
the old El Toro Marines Corps Air Station used to be (talk about
doomed), and you'll immediately see Cox's mug and this message:
Remember this man's face because this is the guy who is to blame for
what has happened to the former El Toro Marine Base in Irvine,
California (the site of the “Great Park”), and the surrounding economy.
Join the growing cry for an investigation into Cox, his wife, business
associates, and his involvement in the closure and sale of El Toro that
fleeced us all out of billions and left us to fester in El Toro's toxic
waste that continues to spread outward from El Toro.
Almost makes one feel sorry for Ol' Chrissie, now doesn't it?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.