Kicking off the new “Era of Responsibility”:
Tax-evader Timothy Geitner is going to be the new Treasury Secretary! When you run the IRS there’s a slim chance of getting audited again…
“During the hothouse days of the presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbacher became famous because he got Barack Obama to confess that he likes to spread the wealth around. Better known as Joe the Plumber, the Toledo, Ohio, laborer became the target of bottomless venom and scorn because he seemed like an obstacle to Obama’s coronation.
One of the main talking points, particularly among left-wing bloggers, was that Wurzelbacher was a tax cheat because, it was revealed by ABC News, he had a tax lien of $1,182 for back Ohio state taxes. This fueled the argument that he was a fraud, his opinion didn’t matter. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Fast-forward to today. Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s choice to be the next treasury secretary, quite clearly tried to defraud the government of tens of thousands in payroll taxes while working at the International Monetary Fund. The IMF does not withhold such taxes but does compensate American employees who must pay them out of pocket. Geithner took the compensation — which involves considerable paperwork — but then simply pocketed the money…
I thought the Democrats believed the financial implosion was caused by arrogant and greedy men who thought the rules didn’t apply to them because they were so important. I guess they didn’t mean it.”
“When the going gets tough, the tough go campaigning. So, almost as if he were still running for office rather than actually running an office, the president arranges a photo-op or a town-hall meeting, where, for the moment, the hopeychangey shtick still plays. ‘I have an urgent need,’ a freeborn citizen of the republic (I use the term loosely) beseeched the president in Fort Myers this week. ‘We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.’
As Michelle Malkin commented of the urgent needer: ‘If she had [had] more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too.’ Obama took her name — Henrietta Hughes — and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he won’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be…
Someday soon this inaugural Obamateur Hour (as one of my correspondents, John Gross, calls it) will end and the ‘events’ phase will begin. Back last spring, some gloomy reflections of mine on multiculturalism prompted a reader to advise me to lighten up: ‘We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.’ A mere nine months later, the first part of that equation no longer seems quite so obvious…
America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality, or it can buckle its mandatory seatbelt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . .
Let’s not go there.”
Glenn can seem pretty buffoonish to anyone who isn’t used to him; I’ve been listening to his radio show for the last 3-4 years and he predicted our current economic crisis well before anyone else saw it coming. He lost a lot of ratings for harping on it for the last couple of years, but he knew what needed to be said. His credibility with me is as high as it gets.
