Slate.com embarrassment Matthew Yglesias fisked on Neil Barofsky

We've been remiss in not commenting on heroic former Inspector General Neil Barofsky blowing the whistle on the TARP ripoff and the Treasury Department's fealty to Wall Street.

Fortunately, our SLOB friend Beers with Demo says all that needs to be said.

Barofsky explains that the Treasury Department/Wall Street relationship is the very epitome of regulatory capture whereby the regulatory nature of the department is gamed exclusively to favor the Wall Street financial firms and has become so self-serving that in Barofsky's words Washington had abandoned Main Street while rescuing Wall Street.

Click on over and read the whole thing, then come back for Geithner apologist Matthew Yglesias' diarrhea of the brain.

Back? Great. In June, we commented on the fact that Slate.com's "Moneybox" column was taken over by a leftist philosophy major with no education or experience in finance or economics. We fisked the cheeky idiot's pathetic attempt to argue with some of the foremost economists alive.

And now for symmetry, as we fisked Yglesias from the right, the brilliant Yves Smith fisks him from the left at Naked Capitalism.

I’ve dragged my feet on addressing it, precisely because it manages to achieve a remarkable density of misdirection, obfuscation, straw manning and misrepresentation in a mere 745 words. I don’t read Yglesias much because he has gotten the art of propagandizing down so well that it probably comes from him as second nature, just as an author of bodice-rippers knows what story lines, scenes, and turns of phrase will evoke the desired Pavlovian responses in the target audience. So I thought it would be worthwhile to parse this piece not just because it was worth debunking, but also an an exercise in identifying some of his devices.

Now you know you have to go on over and read that whole thing.

And then buy Barofsky's book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.