…an echo chamber…an echo chamber…an echo chamber…an echo chamber…
[Late morning update]
More thoughts from Mickey, who is despairing of ever getting an invitation.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
What Did Geithner Not Know?
…and when did he not know it? And a bonus — “heckuva job, Timmy!”
I think I hear the bus starting to warm up its engine in preparation for its next victim.
By way of the AllahPundit we learn that TIME has been told that the Fed flagged the AIG bonuses to Treasury on Feb 28, ten days before word percolated to Geithner. What an operation – Geithner was at the NY Fed working with Hank Paulson on these bailouts, was brought to Treasury to provide continuity, and now has forgotten everything prior to Jan 20, 2009. Geithner needs to bring on some senior staffers so he can fire someone. Inshallah.
…FREUD IS EVERYWHERE: I know they are a bit down on Obama just now but this reflexive Bush-bashing from the Chi Trib blog is ridiculous:
This appears to be a case where the government’s right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner learned only last week about the bonuses, according to the Bush Administration.
Yes, we all miss Ari and Dana and what’s his name. But since this is the Obama Administration let me offer an editing suggestion: “This appears to be a case where the government’s left hand didn’t know what the far left hand was doing.” Just trying to help.
Maguire is a one-man wrecking crew on this story.
The Problem Is Bigger Than Them
Jim Manzi has some useful thoughts:
Commentators on both the Left and Right seem to think that if only we could get the right person to take over these companies and clean up the financial mess, everything would be OK. All it takes is somebody competent and honest, because the answers are so obvious. A rotating series of scapegoats has been created. Paulson? Fool. Geithner? Moron. Liddy? Stooge. It’s funny how their idiocy didn’t seem to surface so much in their prior careers.
Maybe the issue isn’t with the men we’ve selected, but with the problem we’ve asked them to address. Some problems don’t have solutions. The American electorate seems to be intent on re-learning the lesson that how to effectively manage socialized means of production is one of them. The tuition for this course tends to be pretty steep.
I’m sure that Liddy is deeply regetting that he took the job, particularly given the (lack of) financial compensation. The notion that a government, or any one person, is smart enough to run an economy is what Hayek called the fatal conceit.
[Update early evening]
It’s cliché to say there’s a lot of blame but going around — but there is a lot of blame to go around.
Everywhere you turn in this mess, you can find government right there. To say this is a private-sector failure is ridiculous. It’s like Forrest Gump, where he keeps showing up at historic moments. Everywhere you look in this mess, again and again, you see government.
The most infuriating thing about these clowns, both in Washington and the press, is how a non-existent free market and “deregulation” keeps getting falsely blamed for this as an excuse for bigger government and more regulation.
Fun With Teleprompters
Somehow this seems appropriate:
A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.
Well, who else should he have thanked? He is The One, after all.
And I agree with this:
Imagine if George W. Bush had such a crutch and pulled a monster gaffe like this. It would be played 24/7 on television until the end of time.
For some strange reason, the networks refuse to release video of this great moment in hilarity.
This reliance on his TelePrompter is just embarrassing.
Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the “teleprompt president” over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.
Who considers him a great orator other than his slobbering media sycophants? Any time the man has to utter more than two sentences off script he becomes The Wizard of Uhhhs.
We know that it would have been shown endlessly had it been George Bush.
Who Broke AIG?
Tom Maguire (unlike the media) is on the case. I particularly like this comment:
I’m beginning to think the general journalistic reaction to this whole thing is “But I went to Journalism school because they said there was no maaaaath!”
Or logic.
Turnabout Is (More Than) Fair Play
I agree with the AIG execs — Congress should resign or commit sepuku:
“In all candor, I don’t know why they’re so exercised by some bonuses. These pathetic excuses for politicians cost the taxpayers trillions of dollars and, worst of all, they’re still in power.”
Of course, in order to do that, one must have some sense of shame. Or honor. I don’t see any evidence of that in the likes of Chris Dodd or Barney Frank.
The Uninvited
I’m thinking that along about now Ezra Klein is wishing that he had invited Mickey:
We non-elite writers learn something just from watching the sausage get made. One thing we learn is it’s just sausage. Ezra Klein has taken a lot of what could be highly informative back and forth on the World Wide Web and privatized it, much as rich people in gated communities reclaim green space from the public sphere and wall it off behind guards and fences. It’s not an egalitarian or democratic impulse.
I for one, am unshocked. These folks have a much higher opinion of their democratic impulses than is justified by their actual behavior.
[Update a couple minutes later]
An Instapundit emailer has an amusing suggestion:
Funny, isn’t it, how during the Bush Administration, the New York Times and the “mainstream” news organizations spilled national security secrets on a whim, but Journolist is a sacrosanct temple of secrets. The CIA should run all secret programs from within a “tea party” protest, it will guarantee a media blackout.
And note, we’re discussing all this stuff, making the sausage, in public.
Missing The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Gerard van der Leun isn’t:
The death of the P.I. and its “life in death” on the Web is only the second in a trend that will grow. And as the other papers fail into the Web we will hear, again and again, about the Internet, about Craigslist, about The Drudge Report, and a hundred other reasons these papers are dead. What we will never hear is that their editorial policies and news slanting were part and parcel of their demise. We will never hear about the willed insults, slights, and snubbing of fully half of their potential circulation pool. Journalists and editors write a lot about “taking personal responsibility” when it comes to others. You never hear them write that about themselves. There’s no mea culpa among liberal newspaper journalists these days. There’s only “The Internet ate my newspaper.”
It could apply to a lot of the corpses.
A Glimpse Through The Veil
…of the travesty, indeed atrocity that American public education has become:
The reporter, Ginger Thompson, describes how a teacher prepares students for a standardized test. It’s a classic case of “teaching to the test” rather than teaching the subject itself. But that’s only part of the problem:
“If you see a question about Bolsheviks on the test,” Ms. Cain said, “the answer is probably Red Scare.”
So that’s the one thing Virginia high school students are apparently expected to understand about the Bolsheviks: They inspired American paranoia. That’s the Bolshevik legacy, you know.
Sadly, it’s no doubt a tip of the iceberg. And of course the NYT reporter found nothing remarkable about it.
Making Orwell Proud
Some examples from VDH:
Guantanamo is still open, but there are no longer “enemy combatants” there (Perhaps the name of the camp can be changed next?). The old campaign snicker that a naïve McCain really believed that a then-stronger economy is “fundamentally sound” is now the new Obama gospel about a far weaker one. There are to be no more earmarks in spite of 8,000-plus new ones. A $3.6 trillion-dollar budget is proof of commitment to financial responsibility; the remedy of Bush’s borrowing profligacy is to increase the deficit from $500 billion to $1.7 trillion. Bush’s signing statements bad; Obama’s signing statements good. An end to lobbyists in an administration ensure there are over ten; the highest ethical standards mean the nominations of Daschle, Richardson, etc. The changing meaning of words really does trump memory and reality itself.
Not to mention what a disaster that it would be to make health insurance benefits taxable, which was one of the many mendacious ways by which they slithered into the White House, except that now, maybe it’s not such a bad idea:
Now that Mr. Obama has begun the health debate, several advisers say that while he will not propose changing the tax-free status of employee health benefits, neither will he oppose it if Congress does so.
Let me translate: “Yes, I don’t want to take responsibility for it, because even my lapdogs in the media might find that too much hypocrisy to stomach after all my demagoguery on the issue last fall, but I’ll sign the bill when it gets to my desk, so go for it.”
Well, actually, I’m not sure that it would make Orwell proud. More likely sad at his own prescience.