I am a devotee of opera. I was fortunate enough to sing as a leading bass-baritone in several regional opera companies for a few years, so I know from personal experience that any opera production is a mad monkey house that would warrant any sane participant a life time prescription of Xanax. I’ve sung in productions in old Gothic cathedrals, cracker box stages in Hollywood’s theater district, an old bowling alley and an acoustically bankrupt supper club.
The life lesson I learned from opera is that the more complicated an endeavor, the greater the exponential probability of something getting royally screwed up.
Our current state of economic travails seem to mirror an operatic parallel universe with all the faux-pathos and toxic comedy of the legislative libretto co-written by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi while musically underscored on the ukulele by “Tiny Tim” Geithner. All final performance critiques, however, must reasonably be laid upon the podium of Conductor-in-Chief Obama. Is it an inconvenient truth that Reid and Pelosi were given the task of creating a 1,172 page Wagnerian partisan opus which was relegated to a mere five hours of debate before passage and was eventually signed, unread of course, by the president?
And if Obama had actually cared to read it, doesn’t it stand to reason that he then wouldn’t have been so “surprised” and “outraged” when AIG’s monsoon of money bags rained down from taxpayer heaven? Shouldn’t we, the taxpayers, be likewise “surprised” and “outraged” that the top two beneficiaries of AIG lobby largesse during the last electoral Gotterdamurung was the chairman of the Senate banking committee, Sen. Chris Dodd ($103,000) and President Obama ($101,000)?
Let me get this straight. A legal contract was signed and duly executed by the president yet he neither bothered to read the fine print let alone the big print and now he demands a legislative remedy to provide him with political plumber’s crack camouflage initiated from his own ignorance and incompetence? Now, in a sudden epiphany of self-righteous indignation during this “new era of responsibility,” every kazoo player in this clown car concerto, from the White House to Capitol Hill and every cacaphonic corner of the Obamanation’s cult-punditry, are trying to get a whole lot of words in edgewise. They are either [A] busily throwing each other under the churning wheels of the nearest public transportation, [B] have developed an acute case of selective cranio-rectal amnesia or [C] both A and B are correct.
Any morally cognizant individual in a position of authority that merely accepts “full responsibility” on a conditional basis is either bereft of the dictionary meaning of “full responsibility” or that individual’s cajones dropped off in the gutter of the White House bowling alley. Quite frankly, Obama should stop blaming Bush if he’s going to continue to act like him.
AIG makes an easy, lazy target. Most folks prefer this as there is no requirement to think too hard nor to remember the Santayanan historical interlude that they are most assuredly doomed to repeat. Case in point: Sen. Dodd and then-Sen. Obama were both in favor of the original autumn bailout for AIG in 2008 despite their vocal criticisms to the contrary. Both were in favor of Dubya’s TARP bail out of Wall Street, which was then used as a template for the current Porkzilla Act of 2009.
Dodd authored the corporate bonus bucks amendment for Porkzilla to provide further financial succor to the captains of finance despite lying about it later. The president’s first major legislative embarrassment was then signed behind closed doors without significant press coverage in Colorado. The legislation was then treated as if it were a special needs kid that Obama would have had to keep in the basement so as not to discomfit the rest of the American family but still not too mortified to jest cavalierly about it later on the boob tube with Jay Leno.
And just to demonstrate that the Obamaphiliacs are more than willing to eat their own in order to protect the Bowler-in-Chief’s poll numbers, then consider this; in order to deflect public attention from Obama’s split frame of economic equivocation and late night TV boot licking, local SMDP columnist, Kenny Mack, offered up former AIG head honcho Joe Cassano as his scapegoat for politically expedient umbrage. Is it an inconvenient truth that Joe Cassano is a fellow Democrat and that Cassano contributed $4,800 to Obama’s combined campaign funds as well as $2,100 to Chris Dodd coffers?
Which begs the question: What is the resale value on intra-party loyalty in the wholesale presidential gutter ball bull market of personal responsibility? I wouldn’t trust the answer as far as I could throw a bowling ball.
Steve Breen found out that bowling balls are a great deterrent during home invasion robberies but that dogs don’t play fetch very well with them and is still “the best looking mailman in the U.S. Post Office.” He can reached at dulcamarax@yahoo.com.
