Dibs on Dobbs

May I be the first to point out how truly bizarre this statement is?

"The Dow Jones Industrials today quietly lost another 240 points."
-Lou Dobbs, on his Tuesday, March 13 broadcast. Transcript here. The remark, in full context, was:

President Bush and Senator Kennedy are absolute soul-mates who share distorted, even twisted views about their responsibilities to the American people and the laws they've been elected to uphold.

And corporate America is doing its best to roll back all that inconvenient government oversight and regulation tonight with the help of the co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed amidst the corporate corruption scandals of just a few years ago.

Corporate America and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been conspicuously quiet on the backdating of stock options and the sub-prime mortgage lenders and their financial structures that are now undermining the stock market.

By the way, the Dow Jones Industrials today quietly lost another 240 points.

Words mean something. And no one is more aware of this than Lou Dobbs, who, while misguided, is one of the most eloquent men on television.

So he knows that the word "quietly" tends to mean underreported. Hidden. Even scandalously so. The genesis and spread of genetically modified crops occurs quietly. You might make the case that influence brokering in Washington D.C. occurs quietly. The Dow Jones does not shed over a percentage point of its worth quietly. Certainly a federal investigation into backdating stock options is not happening quietly. And while the implication that the SEC has oversight into sub-prime mortgages is surreal, certainly corporate mortgage lenders knew the risks up front, which is why these mortgages are referred to as "high risk" to begin with.

Unless Dobbs is somehow implying that "Corporate America" intended for the Dow 30 to fall, the home buying market to dry up, and the prime rate to rise. But it isn't clear what the blue chips would gain if they did.