Two Crises Wasted

Washington's perverse refusal to grapple with the energy crisis or to genuinely reform Wall Street.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, July 27, 2010, at 10:04 AM ET

The past news week was dominated by the Shirley Sherrod saga, a miserable episode that involved political operatives masquerading as journalists distorting fact in order to promote pre-existing bias, followed by a rush to judgment on the part of those too weak or fearful to exercise independent thought. A casualty of the Sherrod story's domination of the news is that it obscured the whimpering end of two of the largest crises of the past several years: the signing of the Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill and the plugging of the BP well.