This blogger hates Senators who Twitter, too. Damn Twits! The Krait's dream Treasury Secretary would be "...so terrifying that if you were stuck in an elevator alone with him, you would just automatically hand over your wallet and credit cards." Indeed, this blogger viscerally wants a POTUS who is that terrifying. Perhaps "the community organizer" has the stuff to be terrifying when such a response is needed. Right now, the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave doesn't need a leader carrying a pitchfork and a torch. Or, perhaps it does. If this is (fair & balanced) choler, so be it.
PS: The Krait (Gail Collins) is the distaff Op-Ed teammate of The Cobra (Maureen Dowd).
[x NY Fishwrap]
The Grievance Committee
By Gail Collins
Tag Cloud of the following article
Angry. So very, very angry. Unable to speak due to mega-anger washing over every pore and fiber of my being. Anger is in. (Hope’s so ... January.)
I am extremely angry at Tim Geithner for being such a baby that he couldn’t scare a bunch of American International Group quants into forgoing their bonuses. We need a Treasury secretary so terrifying that if you were stuck in an elevator alone with him, you would just automatically hand over your wallet and credit cards.
Somebody as weird and tirade-prone as Hank Paulson. Although when he had Geithner’s job we hated Hank Paulson. Hated, hated, hated. Many people thought he was the worst Treasury secretary ever, although at this moment I am hard pressed to remember the name of any of the other ones since Alexander Hamilton. Except for Robert Rubin, who we used to like but now we don’t because he was a banker.
Hate those bankers. However, Jimmy Stewart seemed nice in that movie about Christmas.
Geithner claims nobody warned him that this bonus scandal was coming down the pike. Is it because he doesn’t have any assistants? It appears there’s nobody in the world of finance who wants to accept a top-level Treasury job if it means letting the White House accountants go over their tax returns. Geithner is walking around listening to the hallways echo, like the only kid at boarding school who didn’t get invited home for Christmas.
I hate everybody in the world of finance. Also accountants, since it’s tax time.
And I’m totally angry at everybody in Congress for trying to pretend that they’re angrier than I am. Like Senator Chuck Grassley saying the A.I.G. execs should follow the Japanese model and “resign or go commit suicide.” Took him about three seconds to backtrack. “Inteligent journalist can’t recgnize rhetoric,” Grassley twittered.
The senator from Iowa is a big twitterer. On Monday, he shared the details of his day: “Red previous Twitter. Did get DsM Eastern Star EastGate Lodge Swiss Steak Dinner. Great food price of tip at any Sun dinner I recomend.” If Grassley was truly outraged at the seppuku-demanding level, wouldn’t he have reported that although the Swiss steak dinner smelled tasty, he was unable to partake because his digestive system was overflowing with bile? And do you think he knows how to spell “intelligent”?
I hate senators who Twitter.
On Wednesday, Edward Liddy, the head of A.I.G., was hauled in front of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises where everybody was extremely eager to express their outrage about the $165 million in bonuses for employees in A.I.G.’s financial (Credit Swaps Derivatives R Us) products division.
This is the same subcommittee that came to our attention a year ago when then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York wheedled an invitation to testify about bond insurance so he could go to Washington for a night of hanky-panky at the Mayflower Hotel. I really hate the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises.
Liddy, a retired insurance executive who took over A.I.G. six months ago at the behest of the Treasury Department, said he had asked most of those who got a bonus to give at least half back. This did not seem to calm the subcommittee members down very much, although the fact that Liddy is working without pay while getting mail from people who want to garrote him with piano wire seemed to have a slight dampening effect.
It is not particularly satisfying to complain about businessmen who answer their country’s call for $1 a year. However, Liddy does have three houses, which is one above the new quota.
Let’s complain about Barack Obama. Why doesn’t he sound angrier? Doesn’t he understand that his job right now is to be the Great Venter?
Sure he keeps saying he’s mad. But you can tell that he secretly thinks it’s crazy to obsess about $165 million in bonuses in a company that’s still got $1.6 trillion in toxic assets to unravel. “I don’t want to quell that anger. I want to channel our anger in a constructive way,” he said on Wednesday. Everybody knows constructively channeled anger doesn’t really count. It’s like diet pizza.
If John McCain were president, you can bet that we’d be getting outrage 24-7. McCain would be so angry that we’d be scared that he’d have a coronary or invade a new country. The New York Post would be running “Calm Down, Mr. President” headlines.
Except, of course, the whole reason we elected Barack Obama was because when the economy started melting down, Obama seemed sane and calm while McCain appeared to be a loopy visitor from the Planet of the Overwrought.
I hate it when we make irrational, contradictory demands of our president. But, it seems as if that’s what he’s there for. ♥
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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