Ben Bernanke is the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and as such has great influence over what you pay in interest in any financed transaction since he is basically the steward of the currency. He was a Bush appointment, a leading figure in the bank bailout scheme known as TARP and has been enthusiastically embraced by the Obama Administration and they want him re-appointed to another term. Why? Well haven’t you heard? Ben Bernanke saved the universe last fall.

It was not the universe of pulsars and hydrogen clouds. It was the financial universe, but we can perhaps forgive a grillionaire veteran of high-finance for thinking they are one in the same but there are good reasons to question whether even the financial universe has been “saved”. Certainly the Great Recession is not a cataclysm on par with the Great Depression or at least not yet, and this good circumstance we owe to Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (also a Bush holdover) and of course Barack Obama. We can assign a bit of credit also to John McCain and Bush. The TARP program of buying crapulent assets from deep-pocketed bankers was a great demonstration of this “bipartisanship” you hear so much about. And that’s good stuff. But these sentiments rest on one proposition that cannot be proven or disproven; that absent the bailouts, our financial situation would be much, much worse.

The Obies, Bushies and McCainiacs speak with one voice on this. Rove and Axelrod; James Carville and Dana Perino all agree, not to mention media types as diverse as Bill O’Reilly and Katie Couric. Absent the TARP and related bailouts like the auto industry “rescue” it would be Grapes of Wrath time; a dust-bowl in the midwest, stock brokers raining into the streets and even ma and pa foreclosed and tossed to the curb. Whew! Thanks Uncle Ben!

But there is no way to test this, is there? Without access to a time machine and the will to experiment this scare story amounts to a blank assertion supported only by the agregate credibility of those telling it and given all the worthies across the political spectrum that believe this tale, that is quite a bit of credibility indeed.

But credibility cannot live on its own, like all of us it exists at the pleasure of that bitch Reality. And Reality is displeased.

The first tangible sign of this displeasure came with the effects of the Stimuli. This metaphorical “injection” of all-too-real billions (850 now, recently revised UP) into the buttocks of our ailing institutions was a concoction of the same team and under the same premises as TARP. When the Stimuli were passed it was with a similar scare story only this one, thankfully, came with some hard numbers. We were told that without the Stim we would suffer unemployment as high as eight percent. Dreadful! With it, a still painful six percent but in any case they told us it would all revert to “normal”, oh, about now. I think we can safely say Reality got the better of that exchange.

Credibility took another hit in the auto bailouts, most obviously in Cash For Clunkers which vastly increased the national debt while conspicuously lowering the national wealth by destroying billions in used cars. This was a twofer almost unprecedented, especially as its modest goals both fiscal and environmental, almost completely backfired.

The declared necessity and even practicality of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay was also a triumph of bipartisanship as Skipper McCain was on this boat but those vapid aspirations have turned to splinters by the rocks of actually having to do it; Reality intrudes, rudely again. The distress cries of “WARMING!” in a freezing hemisphere take a licking from Reality every day, courtesy of the thermometer, but these also enjoy bipartisan investments of credibility and have proven stubborn.

Reality has been a cruel mistress always but she seems particularly peevish lately. She seems to feel herself abused by the asserted realities defiantly blasted from every mouth into every ear at every minute which she must finally demolish and sweep away, over and over again. Let’s help her out here and pronounce the bailouts, stimuli and other malign interventions unnecessary, indeed quite harmful even beyond their titanic (and rising) costs. It is time to declare the simple truths EVERYONE who does not earn their beans in politics knows. In large measure our current woes are CAUSED by these acts. They are worsened by the mere contemplation of further similar measures so we MUST at the very least turn out (and turn ON) the leaders responsible for these disasters. Ben Bernanke rationally heads this list. A re-appointment for Ben Bernanke is not even a vote for the status quo. It is a vote for even MORE of the same. Toleration of the tax thief Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary is too, with a side order of blatant corruption. We have to get back on the side of Reality regardless of whose toes we step on even if they are our own. A mighty logjam of unreality is backing up  and threatening a big clean-up job for Reality. If we don’t do it now she will do it later. And not with good cheer.

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