It’s a new year and we have a new President. The Democrats are prostrate in their ecstacy while the Republicans try to salvage some dignity after a ludicrous campaign that resulted in major losses. Wall Street, the media, and others who lost their sense of personal responsibility in the game of speculation still can’t find their ass with both hands. The rest of us, of more modest and realistic means, sit here wondering how we’re going to pay our bills as the landscape grows more and more uncertain and the trickle of our tax money becomes a bloody, raging river diverted upstream to bail out those who got us into this mess in the first place.
It’s time to get up off those worshipping knees, toss those rose-colored glasses and take a good look around you.
Right off the bat the Obama inner circle decides Timothy Geithner is a good choice for Treasury Secretary. I don’t know about you, but it sure gives me a warm & fuzzy that someone besides his mother really believes a man – who was awarded a masters degree in international economics – who conveniently “forgets” to pay his own personal taxes can do a good job watching over the economy of an entire nation.
Now it comes to rather ironic light that he’s shot off his Asian-studies-educated mouth about China “manipulating its currency” – in writing, no less – causing a headlong scramble – led by Joe Biden, no less; he himself a carrier of open mouth disease – to head off the possibility of a trade war. Don’t care for that kind of icing on the recession cake we’ve been forced to eat of late? Too bad. The damage has already been done and the new administration isn’t even a whole 2 weeks old.
Now the news apparently worth just a single day of reporting is that Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, also conveniently forgot to pay taxes on a chauffeur perk. For years. But accompanied by a large sucking sound coming from the media, since he made up for it and wrote the check on January 2, 2009, it’s ok.
I hate to state the obvious, but no, it’s not.
Just what do these people drink or smoke at night? How can they believe that these kinds of behaviors have become acceptable in our society? The message being sent loud and clear from Capitol Hill – purported to be our finest examples of leadership – is that cheating and lying are ok as long as the excuse is “I forgot”. (And that’s only if you get caught.)
And yet they continue to make fun of and lambast GWB. Now, I don’t say that in George’s defense for I’ve never been a fan, but the sheer hypocrisy really ought to scare the bejesus out of you.
And last but not least, while those of us struggling to make ends meet in the frigid Midwest sit wrapped in blankets because we’ve turned down our thermostats in order to patriotically save energy and out of necessity to save money, President Obama toodles around the White House in his shirtsleeves with the heat kicked up high enough “to grow orchids”. Ostensibly because “he’s from Hawaii”. Anyone else remember that he hasn’t actually lived in Hawaii (or anywhere else toasy warm) for 30 years? He went to college in the Northeast, and spent his entire adult life in the Midwest, neither of which are exactly subtropical paradises.
As it’s been said, please, don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.