Today on Morning Joe, I noticed an outrageous innovation. Though Pat Buchanan clearly has a bunk at the MSNBC studios, so much is he there, he appeared only by remote. Why? My guess: Pat is smarter, funnier, and more interesting than the rest of them put together. He threatens the ignorant if telegenic. Wake up, MSNBC. It needs to be Morning Pat.

Pat is a great star even when he is wrong. Today, asked by Mike Barnicle to explain Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he ignored their roots in the New Deal, when they were State institutions, and the role of the Nixon administration in their phony “privatization,” their transformation from socialist operations into fascist ones. Pat, these are NOT capitalist companies. Yes, the salaries and perks of their politically appointed fat cats are outrageous, because they are not market salaries and perks. Pat also mentioned Countrywide in that regard, but this is a State-connected, politically protected firm as well. It is the Fed, the banks, and Fannie-Freddie that made the mortgage bubble possible, and they must be blamed, not the free market. Oh–and Pat notes that a Lehman Brothers has to be bailed out unlike GM because it is tied into so many other firms. Huh? And GM isn’t? There is a reason that GM’s closing does not threaten Ford or Toyota–just the opposite–whereas the banks and financial houses can pull each other down. They are hyper-leveraged, thanks to the Fed and its boom, and hold lots of bad paper–as Pat noted. But the whole system is at risk and fundamentally corrupt because banks have fractional reserves. What would be criminal conduct in normal corporations is, thanks to State privilege, SOP for banks.