Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Seriously...
Timothy Geithner, our new tax-dodging Secretary of the Treasury, addressed the Keepers of Wall Street about what the Fed'ral Gubmint intends to do about our fiscal nightmare. They almost puked. The market fell 400 points almost as soon as he began speaking.

Prior to this meeting, Geithner tried to explain what the Obambi Administration planned to do about our fiscal nightmare to the collection of idiots called Congress. And Congress laughed him out of the room.

It's difficult to take this man seriously, apparently. The people who know money seem to think he's woefully unprepared (yet we were told that this was exactly the man for the job, since he'd been at the epicenter of the failed TARP program, and understood all aspects of the financial system's collapse), and if he's not unprepared, then he's crazy. He has, in effect, asked businessmen who have already been burned by doing what the government told them to do (i.e. make bad loans to people who had the worse credit ratings than Upper Volta), and who are now scared absolutely shitless about spending a penny that can't be either funnelled into their own pockets, spent for their own amusement, or used to shore up a sagging stock price, to pony up and eat bad investments that he swears he will insure. He doesn't exactly say 'eat', he basically says 'I encourage you to buy the bad assets already on your books as an investment'.

He does not indicate where the money will come from, but it'll be insured. He doesn't know exactly how the plan is supposed to work, just that it'll be a really-spiffy 'public-private venture', but it will work. He can't tell you, not just this minute, how bad assets will be priced, but somehow, it'll be attractive enough to make it a worthwhile investment, even in this recession.

Congress simply brushed him off. Like he was a six-year old in Daddy's suit, playing CPA.

When you can't get desperate money-managers who need an out, and even-more-desperate Congresscritters who need to be seen as 'doing somthing' for the sake of avoiding the question of 'what are you doing?', to take you seriously, you must be some sort of loser.

Yes, this will all magically work, because a man who can't file his taxes properly, either through criminal activity or stupidity, can be trusted to come up with a cracker of a plan. Yep, all makes sense.

HopeChangeWeCanBelieveIn. See you all on the bread line.

The Wall Street Journal chimes in.
Shmuck Schumer...
Via Anne Althouse, yet another reason why this country is so completely phucked: Charles Schumer (Moron-New York). This is the attitude that is at the root of almost all of America's problems; the Anointed Classes (in business, academia and now, obviously, in politics) believe that we don't care -- Schumer was just dumb enough to actually come out and say it, and worse, one gets the impression that Schumer and his ilk not only believe we don't care, but that we're stupid, as well.

Obviously we are -- Schumer keeps getting re-elected.

Remember this about Charles Schumer; his only concern is Charles Schumer. He can talk all he wants about serving the public interest, and what a privilege it is to be a Senator from the Great State of New York, but it has been said for many years now that Schumer is a self-serving egomaniac who can't help himself if there's a chance of getting his moribund mug on television. He's a shining example of the old maxim that the best way to tell if a politician is lying is to see if his lips are moving. There is no crusade, no matter how petty, minor or inconsequential that Schumer will not take up for the express purpose of putting his name and picture in the newspaper.

Now, in a moment of abject clarity, Schumer makes his opinion on the Great Unwashed Masses perfectly clear. We're dumb. We don't care. We need our elected 'betters' to protect us from ourselves because otherwise we'd all stick our tongues in wall outlets and eat our own feces. It's better that we not ask what he's up to, or what his friends might be doing, because, well, we don't understand it anyway, and can't be bothered to work up the ambition, on our best day, to figure it out.

If you've never before realized just what an asshole Charles Schumer is, he's made it perfectly clear for you. So clear that even an uncaring, mentally-retarded slug like you can understand it.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Of Deer and Headlights...
Well, you asked for hopechange, and you've got it! Once again, naive Americans who are dumb enough to consider Rock of Love and American Idol to be stimulating entertainment, easily fell hard for the titillation and novelty of an attractively-packaged Barack Obama. No one, it seems, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, as H.L. Mencken once told us. This streamlines nicely with George Carlin's contention that the packaging, marketing and distribution of bullshit, is the biggest, and most successful, business in America. And no where is this more evident than in the rise (and very quick descent) of the 44th President of the United States.

So, eat it, Suckers! You've asked for it, and you've gotten it -- in spades (no pun intended). Our President is nothing if not a practiced bullshit artist who managed to finesse his way into office, aided and abetted by a public who can't tell shit from shinola, and who can't be bothered to find out, and by a political opposition that, on a good day, might be able to find it's collective ass with both hands and a compass. It now becomes apparent that all that talk about 'experience' might actually matter after all. It now becomes apparent that all that talk about 'judgement' might actually matter, too. It is now about to become axiomatic that 'cool' is not necessary 'better'. We're about to be taught a very bitter lesson that, sometimes, change is not all it's cracked up to be, and that more often than not, hope is little more than a leap in the dark born out of desperation.

The Spectator weighs in here. So does the normally-unreadable Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News. Meanwhile, the adorable Mary Katherine Ham has this to say about the mindset of the Obamatards and their 60's-retread foot-soldiers.

McCain/Palin, in retrospect, suddenly looks like the best thing since penicillin, despite the idiocy of the campaign they ran. Perhaps we'll have learned our lessons four years hence, but I rather doubt it. After all, all you really need is a very slick marketing campaign, a catchy slogan, and a dumbed-down electorate, and you too can be President of the United States.