Daily Kos: Conrad Is Worse Than Dodd On Countrywide
When the liberals at Daily Kos are throwing you under the bus maybe it’s time to admit there’s a problem:
I didn’t get a single e-mail defending Kent Conrad, who, when he sought a loan from Countrywide, had his friend Jim Johnson arrange a phone call with Angelo Mozilo, the company’s CEO. Conrad says he doesn’t think there is anything unusual about calling a mortgage giant’s CEO to get a loan. Yeah, right.
Conrad received a one-point discount on a million dollar loan for a vacation home (he has since donated $10,700 to charity to offset the value of the discount) and was given a loan on an eight-unit apartment building even though Countrywide lending rules restricted such loans to four-unit buildings.
It’s possible that the reason why nobody defended Kent Conrad is that Conrad put himself in a worse position…
It’s a little funny that this dislike of Conrad is motivated by the Senator being on the fence about government health care (if he was more in favor of Obama’s health care plans would that make his extra-special VIP loans better?), but this Kos diarist does make a good point.
Conrad called his buddy Jim Johnson to get a hold of Mozilo to get a loan. That is inappropriate behavior for a US Senator, particularly one who is contemporaneously helping to shepherd legislation through Congress worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the company he was trying to get a loan from.
Conrad doesn’t have any excuses. What he did was wrong. He needs to come clean and apologize. Now.
