As we near the end of the Bush epoch, I notice that my outrage meter has fallen out of calibration. I don’t yell at the TV grandpa-style anymore, and even as Dick Cheney took it to the next level down in his campaign to remove the ‘people’ from “of the people, by the people, for the people,” I couldn’t even muster a post. And it’s not that isn’t significant — he was essentially telling democracy to “go Cheney itself” — it’s just that he and others in his office, and the administration in general, have been doing this for years, a fact documented many times over in our archives.

This doesn’t mean I’m completely numb, but it does take something special to really elevate my hackles. And Hillary Clinton is more than up to the task:

Mrs. Clinton proposed several other moves to deal with foreclosures, like tapping two former chairmen of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Paul A. Volcker, and former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, to lead a “high-level emergency working group” to recommend ways to restructure at-risk mortgages to help avert more foreclosures.

This really quite remarkable. As others have noted, Greenspan is probably more responsible for the housing bubble and resulting credit crunch than any other single person. By keeping interest rates artificially and unsustainably low for too long, and then when rates had nowhere to go but up, famously recommending that buyers take out adjustable rate mortgages, Greenspan couldn’t have done more damage to the system had he hired Britney Spears to run the currency printing presses.

But it’s much, much worse than simply Greenspan being tapped to “fix” a crisis he invented. The real problem is that this wouldn’t be Greenspan’s first tour on such a “high-level emergency working group.” Back in 1983, he was chairman of the…Greenspan Commission, charged with “fixing” social security. His fix created huge surpluses that were then used to cover up budget deficits, all before Easy Al sided with President Bush in his corrosive quest to privatize Social Security by suggesting that those huge surpluses simply didn’t exist.

And this is the guy Hillary wants to play the role of Winston Wolf in the housing crisis version of Pulp Fiction?

There are plenty of smart economists who Clinton could have named. In fact, she did name one in Volcker, who I just might write in on my Presidential ballot*. What I can’t figure out is how Clinton can miss the difference between Volcker, who got this country out of a serious crisis, and Greenspan, who got us into a few. And that, is truly outrageous.

*And yes, Volcker has endorsed Obama. I didn’t say he was perfect.