The Commission! Let's Begin! The Commission! Look Out Sin!

There's good news/bad news on the Financial Crisis front. Commissioners have been named to a "non-partisan" body that will take evidence and draft a report on the causes and effects of the Crash of '08. The good news is that there will be a commission, so we can maybe sort out what was going on at Treasury, the Fed, the Wall Street investment banks, Fannie & Freddie, etc. The bad news is that this will be yet another "non-partisan" commission headed by a partisan Democrat, in this case CA's former Treasurer Phil Angelides, who comes complete expensive suits, unctuous smile and ties to unions and progressive anti-business lobbies. You can almost feel the fairness in the air. Smells like victory: Financial Crisis Commission Chair: Will Leave No Stone Left Unturned

Phil Angelides, the chairman of the newly formed Financial Crisis Commission, pledged Wednesday to leave no stone unturned as part of the body's investigation into the events that led to the monumental collapse of the financial markets last year.

He said that he would not let partisan bickering derail the commission's efforts, citing as an example the panel established in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The 9/11 Commission is hardly the Gold Standard of investigative commissions. Will there be a Richard Clarke figure giving partisan anti-GOP testimony in the same week that his book comes out? Will there be a Jamie Gorelick figure who should be a subject of investigation, rather than having a seat in the judge's chair? Who will take Richard Ben-Veniste's attack dog role? Which room should Sandy Berger go to to steal memos about Clinton/Rubin/Summers efforts to de-regulate banks and use Fannie & Freddie to artificially inflate "affordable housing?" Will there be "Jersey Girls" and "Lehman Families" to jeer testimony by Treasury staffers? With Angelides holding the gavel, I would predict that private interests will be whipped while public interests will benefit from the White Wash.

The other members do give some hope that the proceedings will be conducted in a mature manner:

Joining him is former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida and the ex-chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born.

Representing the business community are Heather Murren, a retired managing director at investment bank Merrill Lynch, and John W. Thompson, chairman of Symantec Corp. (SYMC), a business software provider. The sixth Democratic-appointed member of the panel will be Byron Georgiou, a Las Vegas businessman and attorney.

The Republican appointees to the commission are former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Bill Thomas, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during last year's presidential campaign, former director of the Bush White House's National Economic Council Keith Hennessey, and Peter Wallison, a director at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank

The choices of Hennessey and Born are especially inspired. Hennessey is good on numbers, policy and politics. Born will benefit from the Absolute Moral Authority of having been "right" on regulating derivatives.

The Commission has an ambitious agenda before it. While the 9/11 Commission focused on a single discrete event, the Crash of '08 played out over several years and involved bad decisions made by the thousands in offices and homes across the country. Certainly, creating a spectacle out of show trials for the likes of Ken Lewis and Hank Paulson will be a lot more fun than actually trying to learn what happened. Rather than a search for answers, this could easily devolve into the search for the Narrative. Hopefully enough of the Commissioners will be intellectually rgorous enough to pursue the former, not the latter.