Grassy Knoll Nut Lou Dobbs: President?

According to Lou Dobbs’s bio, he’s the “leading voice of reason” in America. How serendipitous, then, that he should appear with Imus, one of the more unreasonable people in this country.

“A passionate good morning to you!” Dobbs barked, still feeling the energy from last week’s Tax Day Tea Party rally he attended in New York City.

“It was great fun,” he told Imus. “These are terrific people. They’re concerned about their country and fellow citizens, they want to make certain that the future generations of Americans have a country that resembles that which we inherited.”

Plus, Imus joked, “There were probably no illegal immigrants there either, right?”

One of Dobbs’s pet causes has been how to deal with the 12-20 million illegal immigrants in America, and he has been working recently with people in Washington to come up with a solution to the problem.

“We’ve got to have a rational, effective, humane immigration system, and we’ve got to have secure borders and ports,” said Dobbs, who has been accused of, among other things, racism for his position on the issue.

He would not confirm rumors that he’ll run for President, saying he’ll get serious in the next month or so. Dobbs did say, however, that he’d only run if he thought he could win.

“I couldn’t imagine doing it for any other reason,” he said.

The recent SEC action accusing Goldman Sachs of fraudulent activity seems “peculiar” to Dobbs, who thinks Goldman has some very serious questions to answer.

“Goldman’s executives and board may have forgotten, they’re now a commercial bank holding company, and have different responsibilities from when they were a wild-eyed investment bank on Wall Street,” Dobbs observed.

In his opinion, Goldman “got a little too fancy,” and a little too proud. “If Goldman’s management doesn’t understand they’ve got to change the way they’re doing business—and I mean before any financial reform legislation—then they’re on an unfortunate path,” he said.

Dobbs called it “unethical and not wise” for Goldman to put itself in a position to bet against its clients. Determining criminality is not his job, but he owed that part of the firm’s role is to create markets, which is what they did by knowingly pooling bad mortgages and selling them to people so that hedge funds could bet against them.

The real question, Dobbs added, is whether the federal government has “the guts” to reenact the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate commercial and investment banks. In Dobbs’s view, this is necessary because current reform proposals “don’t go far enough to return us to a period of sanity.”

Yet it remains unclear what could possibly be done to restore Dobbs’s own sanity.

-Julie Kanfer