The More Things Change The More Things Stay The Same

Now that Tim Geithner has been confirmed as Treasury Secretary, Tom Daschle has withdrawn as HHS Secretary and Nancy Killefer has withdrawn from some government post I had never even heard of (chief performance officer?), we can infer some new rules in our changed government.

1. It is OK to cheat on taxes, but of course there is a limit. And that limit is more than $34,000 but less than $128,000 in taxes owed if you are a Democrat. (For Republicans, the limit remains the perception of thinking about adding $100 to your charitable deductions without the receipts to back it up.)

2. We now have a new way to get tax cheats to not only pay up, but to apologize for their errors and carelessness: nominate them to Cabinet posts. We've already collected $162,000 and public apologies from just two tax cheats that way. Nancy Killefer is a third, but I don't know the amount. Perhaps Charlie Rangel or William Jefferson should be nominated to replace Daschle.

3. We might have a new method to elicit information and apologies from enemy combatants without resorting to torture, sleep deprivation, stress positions or defiled Korans: nominate them to Cabinet posts. It's too bad we already waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; we might have obtained his confession and plans of other terrorist attacks simply by offering him the position of Secretary of Defense.

4. When we are desperate enough (as in the current economic crisis, or at any time in the last 80 years), neither competence nor ethics matter in a nominee as much as speed of confirmation. If you either can't do your own taxes correctly, or refuse to do them honestly, you can still be put in charge of tax audits and collection. If we ever have a crime crisis, for example, Charles Manson stands a good shot to head the FBI.

5. Of course one lesson is the obvious one: if you thought "change" meant getting competent and honest people with no ties to special interests into influential government positions, you can now consider yourself suckered. I put the lesson this way: you vote for a Wizard, but you get a man behind a curtain."

--Columnist Randall Hoven,
Daschle/Geithner/Killefer Lessons Learned,
American Thinker, February 4, 2009

"Hypocrites." What more can be said?

"The messiah of November has disappeared, gone off to winter somewhere in another galaxy and lounge among the stars. Who knows when (or whether) he'll return. He left a gloomy surrogate with a melancholy message.

The messiah promised "change" but so far demonstrates only that the men we send to live in the White House have changed. FDR called our stoic grandparents to the fireside to tell them there was nothing to fear but fear itself. They believed him, pulled up their socks, survived the Great Depression and went on to fight and win a great world war.

Dr. Doom tells us that fear is the best friend we're likely to find. Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington to clean up after Jimmy Carter, demonstrated that it's still morning in America, and won the Cold War. Dr. Doom tells us that it's late on a dark and stormy night, grovels toward Mecca, and tells ghost stories.

Dwight Eisenhower

"This recession might linger for years," Dr. Doom, aka President Obama, told us Thursday. "Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that at some point we may not be able to reverse."

Woe is definitely us. Why worry about bird flu, global warming or a speeding rock from outer space if we won't be around to see any of those disasters? This is scant reassurance from the confidence man of summer.

In a piece of op-ed commentary in The Washington Post, he puts a little realistic distance between himself and credulous Republicans and other conservatives. "I reject these theories [such as tax cuts], and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change," he writes.

This will come as big news to a lot people who took a flyer on Mr. Obama, persuaded by his friendly embrace of the idea that cutting taxes is good, and his promise not to bother anyone earning less than 200 grand. That was then. Now he only reminds us that he's the president, and we're not."

--columnist Wesley Pruden,
Now For Something Really Different,
Washington Times, February

A more frightening and true to life film Keanu Reeves could have made... The Day the U.S. Grew Exponentially Worse