The Long Transition
So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”
Now you know why I don’t get invited out for dinner much these days. If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we can’t afford them. Forget the grandstands; we don’t need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let’s swear in Barack Obama right now — by choice — with the same haste we did — by necessity — with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One.
...
This is the real “Code Red.” As one banker remarked to me: “We finally found the W.M.D.” They were buried in our own backyard — subprime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them.
-- Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times
This captures some of the mood in the air as we wait another two months for Obama to be sworn in as president and for Dubya to go off and do his own thing and bungle up some business enterprise rather than the American government.
Obama has been impressive during the transition thus far, keeping busy and making professional picks, which is quite a contrast from the cronyism that we have disastrously known over the past eight years. The biggest splash in the news has been his choice of Hillary for secretary of state, as he is consciously going for that “Team of Rivals” vibe that marked Lincoln’s administration. Obama has been quoted as saying that the two most important books in his life these days are the Bible and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book.
High-intelligence and professional competence are back in season, as opposed to having officials who are fanatically driven to try to make the government conform to their narrow, fundamentalist conceptions of what the Bible says, not to mention the more worldly types who only seek to maximize their take from war-profiteering. Honest, constructive government - what a welcome change that will be.
Meanwhile, Bush still has two months to despoil the nation’s resources and to throttle the poor, giving his friends another free sweep into the public trough, even as Rome burns.
Good cartoon.
Now you know why I don’t get invited out for dinner much these days. If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we can’t afford them. Forget the grandstands; we don’t need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let’s swear in Barack Obama right now — by choice — with the same haste we did — by necessity — with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One.
...
This is the real “Code Red.” As one banker remarked to me: “We finally found the W.M.D.” They were buried in our own backyard — subprime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them.
-- Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times
This captures some of the mood in the air as we wait another two months for Obama to be sworn in as president and for Dubya to go off and do his own thing and bungle up some business enterprise rather than the American government.
Obama has been impressive during the transition thus far, keeping busy and making professional picks, which is quite a contrast from the cronyism that we have disastrously known over the past eight years. The biggest splash in the news has been his choice of Hillary for secretary of state, as he is consciously going for that “Team of Rivals” vibe that marked Lincoln’s administration. Obama has been quoted as saying that the two most important books in his life these days are the Bible and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book.
High-intelligence and professional competence are back in season, as opposed to having officials who are fanatically driven to try to make the government conform to their narrow, fundamentalist conceptions of what the Bible says, not to mention the more worldly types who only seek to maximize their take from war-profiteering. Honest, constructive government - what a welcome change that will be.
Meanwhile, Bush still has two months to despoil the nation’s resources and to throttle the poor, giving his friends another free sweep into the public trough, even as Rome burns.
Good cartoon.
