First thing this morning, I had an appointment with one Cassandra Wymiotowac, Senior Public Relations Advisor to American International Group, better known as AIG. The woman was all business, that’s for sure – she entered my office, shook my hand and got right down to brass tacks.
“Mr. Collins,” she began, “this is just one of several appointments I have made today with the finest minds in Washington. The reason for these consultations is that senior AIG officials were summoned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday and subjected to what AIG management considers to be an outrageous public spectacle, during which the sterling reputation of AIG as a financial industry leader was dragged through the muck for nothing more than a session of self-serving election-year grandstanding by a group of totally hypocritical politicians.”
“You are referring,” I surmised, “to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearings?”
“Exactly,” she confirmed. “After an urgent meeting convened at our headquarters on Wednesday, it was decided that I and my colleagues in the AIG Public Relations Department should spare no effort in determining an effective counter-strategy to the shocking abuses of power and mean-spirited smear tactics that committee employed.”
“You mean,” I asked with an innocent tone, “using Congressional subpoenas to compel your top executives to appear before the American people’s duly elected representatives to explain how AIG conducts its affairs?”
“Yes, Mr. Collins,” she agreed, “that’s about the size of it.”
“I’ve reviewed the testimony,” I informed her, “and I can’t help but wonder, why your bosses are so bent out of shape. After all, as of Tuesday, the federal government had given them a total of eighty-five billion dollars, had it not?’
“Yes, it did.”
“And, less than a week afterward, your company used some of that money to spend four hundred and forty-three thousand dollars entertaining AIG employees at an exclusive California resort, didn’t they? Sixteen hundred dollars a night for accommodations, twenty-three thousand dollars expended at the resort spa, nearly seven grand blown playing golf, and, as I recall, a dinner and bar tab something like one hundred and forty-seven thousand bucks?”
“They did,” she replied, a bit testily. “So what? As a private company, AIG is free to structure its employee incentive programs as management sees fit.”
“True,” I conceded, “but in this case, AIG is a private company which, but for Uncle Sam’s largess, would be stony broke and in Chapter 7 bankruptcy.”
Ms. Wymiotowac shrugged. “The federal government decided that the continued viability of AIG outweighed whatever benefits the moral lesson of its demise might have conveyed to the financial sector. Accepting eighty-five billion dollars from the federal government does nothing to change the fact that AIG is still a private business.”
“I’m sure you and your employers see it that way,” I vouched, “but I’m also sure that, as a public relations expert, you must realize that the public may not completely understand the situation”
At that, Ms. Wymiotowac’s glossy facade cracked a bit and she cast her eyes down at the silk Persian rug. “My employers were, shall we say, somewhat disappointed that the PR Department had not been more… pro-active about the… situation, as you put it.”
“Really?” I must confess, I was genuinely surprised. “I’m genuinely surprised to hear that, I must confess,” I said.
She looked up from the carpet at me. “Why?”
“Well,” I opined, “given the circumstances, I don’t think there would be any kind of PR action that could do anything significant to quell public fury at what AIG intended to do. You’re not miracle workers, after all. Nobody could reasonably expect you to get the American people to approve of coddling your so-called ‘top performers’ with a lavish party – on the taxpayer’s dime, no less – while the nation slips into the worst recession since the nineteen-thirties and millions face foreclosure, unemployment and perhaps ten years of hard times.”
My guest breathed what appeared to be a sigh of relief. “So, you don’t think the AIG PR Department is to blame?”
“Certainly not,” I vigorously affirmed. “What AIG top management did smacks of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette snacking on lark tongues in aspic at Versailles Palace while the citizens of France died of starvation in the streets of Paris. It shows utter contempt for every principle of decency upon which the American Republic is founded and, I might add, equal contempt for the American people as well. No public relations expert, no matter how clever, no matter how resourceful, could possibly have put a positive spin on how Louis and Marie behaved. Furthermore, I think it’s obvious that if AIG management believes you or any of your colleagues, individually or collectively, could come up with acceptable excuses for what they did, then they are no more in touch with reality than Adolf Hitler was when he ordered non-existent Wehrmacht divisions to march on Berlin and save his bunker from the Red Army.”
She paused, clearing her throat slightly. “That’s pretty strong language,” she observed, “comparing the executive management of AIG to Louis XVI and Adolf Hitler. I’m sure that if I were to report that remark to my superiors, they would insist on an apology.”
“Very well then,” I acceded, “I apologize to Louis XVI and Adolf Hitler for comparing them to executives of the American International Group Corporation.”
“I appreciate,” she volleyed back, “that you share the indignation of the average citizen about this, but surely, you must realize that AIG financial employees perform valuable services, ones for which commensurate compensation is, by virtue of the free market system, justly and rightly due.”
“’Services,’ Ms. Wymiotowac?” I raised my left eyebrow, just a tad, at that. “What services, pray tell, have they rendered to the American public?”
“Why…” she stuttered momentarily, startled, I suppose, that I would ask such a question. “They make markets.”
“The actions of AIG and other companies like it have frozen the credit markets and crashed the equity markets,” I pointed out. “Unless a miracle occurs between now and the final Friday bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will have completed its worst week in history, surpassing even what happened in October, 1929. As a matter of fact, in constant dollars, General Motors stock is worth less at the moment than it was during the Great Depression.”
“Why,” she smirked, “should I care about the price of GM stock?”
“It’s a bellwether,” I replied dryly. “’As goes General Motors, so goes the nation.’”
“I suppose that someone with a fundamental distrust of capitalism might find recent developments… somewhat distressing,” she answered, betraying a modicum of uncertainty. “But the financial industry also devises new and powerful finiancial instruments that assure maximum creation of wealth for our society.”
“New and powerful financial instruments,” I proposed, “such as the collateralized debt obligations that your derivatives unit was so fond of; instruments which, in fact, have effectively destroyed enormous wealth throughout our society?”
“But,” she protested, “my employers never intended to do that! And I’m sure none of the banks, hedge funds, brokerages and other insurance companies in the financial sector ever anticipated that their inventions would wreck the American economy, either.”
“Which proves nothing more,” I suggested, “than that, apparently, they aren’t actually as smart as they think they are…” I threw her a meaningful glance. “… or as smart as they proudly told the world they were; and therefore shouldn’t even work in the financial industry, much less, as AIG employees have, receive multi-million dollar bonuses and live the high life in exclusive resorts with eighty-five billion of the American people’s money in their pockets, which, just yesterday, I understand, were lined with yet another thirty-eight billion dollars.”
“Mr. Collins,” she said flatly, “given your reputation, I would have expected a more… sophisticated world view from you. Surely, you must realize that when times are good, the public admires and respects the captains of the financial industry. When the stock market and real estate markets were soaring, nobody was screaming about dragging Martin J. Sullivan to the guillotine because he made a lot of money and threw nice parties to reward his best staff. But when, for reasons beyond the control of any of the good people at AIG, things go south, then suddenly the public turns on them, yelling for retribution.” Her face adopted a condescending expression. “How can you respect the opinions of a fickle mob of ignorant, guileless, déclassé morons like that?”
“Allow me to explain,” I requested. “You see, madame, that fickle mob of ignorant, guileless, déclassé morons votes Congress into office. Now, for some strange, unexplainable reason, the people in Congress have concluded that if Wall Street blackmails the Senate and House into forking over hundreds of billions to fix mistakes that Wall Street has been telling everyone for decades would automatically be fixed by ‘invisible hands’ controlling free markets, and then one of those Wall Street firms does something like what AIG did, well, perhaps Wall Street has more than its own share of ignorant, guileless, déclassé morons, and maybe, just maybe… the ignorant, guileless, déclassé morons who put those senators and representatives on Capitol Hill might still, in spite of everything, be smart enough to figure that out.”
Ms. Wymiotowac shrugged, resigned, apparently, to my point of view. “All right, Mr. Collins,” she continued, “I can see that you obviously disapproved, from the very outset, of financial derivatives trading, laissez-faire economic policies and blind trust in people who claimed that only they were smart enough to understand what they were doing, even when the economy was profiting from those things; and, that you are maintaining a consistent position now that the economy is collapsing. Even though I may disagree with you, I can see that you are convinced that the Administration’s apathy, Wall Street’s unfettered use of financial derivatives, and the people on Wall Street who invented and traded those instruments are to blame. I am, however,” she reminded me, “not here to discuss those issues. I’m here to get some advice on what AIG can do next in order to avoid a public outcry to drag everybody in AIG top management into the street, knock out all their teeth, work them over with a blow torch, roll them in broken glass until it sticks to the burns and then lynch them from the nearest light pole with piano wire.”
“Wow,” I exclaimed, “you sure enough paint a damned graphic picture! Where’d you get that?”
“Hate mail,” she confided. “The PR Department has to read all the unsolicited correspondence. That was actually one of the milder suggestions. But,” she declared, brightening a bit, “we’ve got Pinkerton Burns investigating every last one of those whack jobs.”
“Too bad,” I observed, “you can’t sic your dogs on the ones with enough sense to keep their mouths shut and wait for the right opportunity.”
“That’s the Security Department’s predicament, and I have enough of my own to cope with,” she muttered, her mood obviously deflated by the thought. “Not that I’m sleeping all that well myself lately.” A long, quiet moment passed as I watched her summon the strength to continue. “So, Mr. Collins – enough of this gay banter. What’s your advice?”
I leaned back and thought about it, I’m not ashamed to say, for several minutes, while Ms. Wymiotowac diddled with her Blackberry. It was a pretty tough nut to crack, after all, even for me, if I do say so myself.
“How about this:” I offered at last, “casinos.”
“Casinos?”
“That’s right,” I proclaimed, “casinos! Look, the average Joe and Jane Sixpack, they go to Las Vegas, they stay at a big hotel with a casino in it, and they gamble, right? And, the usual Hollywood fairy tale notwithstanding, they lose a lot of money. But do they complain? No! Absolutely not! They knew when they went to Las Vegas that the casinos have a built-in edge, and they did, after all, get to eat a lot of good food for cheap, see all kinds of cool tourist attractions, take in some world-class shows, and enjoy the excitement of rolling dice, betting on roulette, playing blackjack and pulling on the one-armed bandits until their biceps ached like a weight lifters training for the Olympics. Now, consider Wall Street – every year, without fail, the Wall Street Journal has some of their summer interns throw darts at the stock market listings. Then, the staff puts together a ‘straw portfolio’ of the stocks the darts hit and tracks its performance as if real money had been invested in it. And every year, without fail, the Wall Street Journal prints an article which reports, that, by golly, half the supposed financial wizards on Wall Street who pick and recommend stocks did better than that random portfolio and half of them did worse. So – what does this tell us?”
Ms. Wymiotowac responded to my question with a blank stare. “That the summer interns at the Wall Street Journal are greater financial geniuses than half the portfolio managers in the business?”
“No,” I corrected, “it means that investing your money in Wall Street’s financial markets is no different from visiting Las Vegas. The fix is in and the marks are set up. In the long run, you’re guaranteed to lose – but it’s the experience you have while you’re there – that’s what actually matters; that’s what creates the real value of a Las Vegas casino adventure, and, likewise, the real value of investing in financial markets.”
“Okay,” she surrendered, “if I forego an argument with you about whether there’s a genuine difference between somebody cleaning out their bank account at an ATM on the floor of the MGM Grand and sinking their 401(k) into Wall Street paper, where does it get me?”
“All the way to what you’re looking for,” I confidently stated. “Because – think about it – do Joe and Jane Sixpack resent it if the casino manager wears ten-thousand dollar suits, drives around in a Ferrari and visits the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California any time he feels like it? Of course not! Joe and Jane went to Las Vegas and they had a really, really, swell time, didn’t they? Sure, maybe they cleaned out their kid’s college fund or something, but, on the other hand, they knew what they were getting into when they boarded that jet liner, bound for Caesar’s Palace, didn’t they? So, here we have it – everyone knows there’s objective proof, printed every year in the Wall Street Journal, that the financial markets are nothing but a crap shoot. But they give their money to people on Wall Street anyhow, and, for a while, they have the experience of being rich, on paper, at least, and the experience of having other people consider them clever and important. They get to experience the envy of their neighbors who don’t have financial investment portfolios, the admiration of their parents and their children, and, moreover, they get to enjoy the feeling of excitement that comes with a big, fat row of zeros in their monthly statements, a feeling that is not, I hasten to note, unlike the rush your typical gambler gets when they’re on a winning streak in Vegas. There it is – the real value added, the real entertainment content, the actual experience that individual investors get when they play the markets with their life savings. It’s a perfect parallel, and the executives of AIG are no different than that casino manager, and there’s no more reason to be angry at them than there is to be furious with him.”
She lit up like a Christmas tree. “Fantastic!” Out came the laptop, as Ms. Wymiotowac began eagerly taking notes, smiling broadly. “I like it! Let’s work up some press release boilerplate, a bunch of advertisement tag lines and a strategy I can take back to the Marketing Department!”
“My pleasure,” I cooed, glancing at my watch. “I’m available for the next two hours.”
“Well,” she informed me, “I have another meeting in about eighty minutes, but I can get back with you later this afternoon.”
“I have a slot open around five,” I mentioned as I checked my calendar application, “will that work for you?”
“Five-thirty?”
“Done.’
“Great,” she burbled, “let’s get started. If even half of the meetings I attend today produce results this awesome, AIG’s PR problems are over forever!”
Indeed. When she came back at five-thirty, I ran up two extra billable hours for the day, which left me with plenty to smile about myself. Now let’s see what’s shown up lately in my Inbox, as we review the Quarterly Mailbag:
The complaints came in like a barrage of jihadi mortar rounds on the post concerning my chance meeting with General Wesley Clark at the Willard Hotel’s Round Robin Bar, most of them denouncing Clark as a traitor for cozying up to Barack Obama, whom my correspondents writing about that post almost universally condemned as either a Moslem terrorist or a liberal traitor. Say what you want about that, McCain fanatics, as of today, McCain’s infamous admission that he doesn’t know doodly squirt about economics certainly appears ready to trump his military career, whether he’s qualified in foreign affairs or not. Several folks did write in to say nice things about mint juleps, however, and a couple offered their own favorite versions, including one with bitters and carbonated branch water that I found to be very innovative, particularly after drinking more than one of them.
A surprising number of people wrote me to defend the food quality in the CIA cafeteria, which I brutally disparaged in the post presenting my telephone conversation with the Right Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson about his various beefs with Barack Obama. I must confess, I really had no idea that so many people both eat at the CIA cafeteria and read my Web log. I don’t know whether to be happy or scared out of my wits about it, frankly. And I definitely heard from Jesse’s admirers, most of whom excoriated me for making the content of our telephone conversation accessible to the entire world by posting it on the Internet. But I figure, hey, thanks to the Reverend’s open-mic indiscretions, the whole world already knows Jesse wants to get his hands on the Obama family jewels – after that, what further damage could I do to Jesse’s reputation? Talk about spitting in the ocean!
Evel Knievel’s many fans took exception to me advising a certain highly-compensated anonymous client from the financial community to compare his dollar-per-minute compensation and risk of bodily injury with Evel’s whenever anybody criticized him for receiving a multi-million dollar yearly salary. Evel was an inspiring example of the archetypal American maverick hero, they complained, and his legendary persona has nothing in common with a fink like my client. On that point, I will admit that my client, like most of his colleagues, is, at the very least, a fink, and probably a dirty rotten fink at that, if not something much worse. But still, I haven’t heard anything about members of the financial community beating their critics senseless with a baseball bat – not yet, anyway.
Speaking of dirty rotten finks, a lot of people called me one for eating Iranian beluga caviar from my bento box on the plane with Phil Gramm. The fink patrol was composed of two camps, the first being tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-snarfing New Age vegan hippie burn-outs who assured me that eating the roe of an endangered species is such bad karma, I’ll be lucky get reincarnated as a slime mold. The other faction was composed of rabid, flag-waving jingoists, who, for their part, focussed on the concept of Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil, citing that as proof Tom Collins is nothing but a wicked, Godless liberal who obviously hates America and probably hangs out with tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-snarfing New Age vegan hippie burn-outs. So, having duly enraged both extremes of the political spectrum with that post, I’d say, on the whole, it’s convincing evidence I’m turning out a pretty well-balanced journalistic product.
And speaking of my Web log posts making people hopping mad, the hands-down winner this quarter was my article concerning a telephone call from my French friend Jacques, who contacted me to beg that I use my enormous influence to make the United States elect Barack Obama our next President. Apparently, many people of color took exception to my explanation of how Jacques should properly refer to, ah, well, people of color. In addition, a lot of them really hit the ceiling over what I told Jacques about why I will probably vote for Obama. To which I say, hey, if you sincerely want him to become President, and I vote for the guy, do you really care what my motives are? Then there were the folks who wrote in to indignantly inform me that the term that follows “octoroon,” and denotes a person of color who is fifteenth sixteenths white, is “hexadecaroon,” not “macaroon;” and the ones who wrote in to upbraid me for telling Jacques that Americans hate Europeans because they are jealous of Europeans’ style, erudition and culture. As one correspondent in the latter category so trenchantly put it, “Those faggoty [expletive]-suckers over there in Europe don’t even know how to [expletive] right.” Spoken like a true, red-blooded American, ace.
While my post about the radical right Republican rump session of Congress elicited a few amused kudos from liberal left readers, the tide was surely pulling much more strongly with conservatives, who lambasted me for making light of their heroic representatives’ efforts to solve our national energy crisis by talking about it some more at considerable length. To them, I would say – where were you when a Republican-controlled House of Representatives was treating the minority Democrats like fresh, warm, steaming dog turds? Then, I have no doubt, you thought all of the House leadership’s decisions were masterful and well considered. Many readers also wrote in to complain about me “making fun of Twitter,” which, for those of you who are not callow, gawky, socially awkward, pimply and hopelessly unattractive teenagers with nothing better to do, is the latest Internet fad among callow, gawky, socially awkward, pimply and hopelessly unattractive teenagers with nothing better to do. They extolled Twitter’s many cool features, trumpeted its obvious social importance, demanded that I recognize its enormous power and called me a number of things in the current version of inscrutable teenage jargon, all of which, as far as I can tell, added up to “mean old man who doesn’t understand us,” where “old” translates as “over thirty.” I was accused, as has been young peoples’ custom with adults since the days of the pharaohs, of Being Out of Touch with What’s Happening Now, Not Listening to the Important Messages We Are Trying Say and Not Knowing What It’s Like to Be a Teenager These Days. To which I say, I only wish that I had been able to address all of life’s problems when I was nineteen and knew everything. Of course, there are some people my age, and even older, who feel like they still do, and quite a number of them were on display at the House of Representatives the day I wrote that post.
Could I have ever guessed that so many Paris Hilton fans read my Web log? Sure, I’ve taken the random jab at her now and then, and gotten a few e-mails deriding me for it, but my post about Mr. Monsou’s proposed counter-attack against her by the McCain campaign proved that I only thought I knew what sort of people read my online essays. Being roughly in the same age demographic as the Twitter contingent, but obviously equipped with vastly superior fashion sense, much better skin, considerably more poise, well-developed socialization behaviors and many, many more friends, this overwhelmingly female group ranted at me in fierce defense of their beloved Paris, maintaining, almost unanimously, that she’s nowhere near as stupid as she appears to be. Upon due reflection on that point, I must admit that I’m forced to agree – if Paris Hilton really were as dumb as she acts, she’d need a staff of caretakers to feed and dress her. Now, please, don’t write in and tell me that she has one unless you are prepared to prove it.
The mail about my visit from that ISI officer who wanted advice about how to keep Pervez Musharraf from being forced to resign as president of Pakistan mostly ran to testimonials – about one third singing Musharraf’s praises and two thirds declaring in no uncertain terms that he’s the Devil incarnate. A few readers wrote in to complain about me mentioning Richard Nixon in the same context as Musharraf, claiming that Nixon got a raw deal and doesn’t deserve to have his memory besmirched in such a callous manner. To them, I would reply that both of them had shifty eyes, both of them always looked like they needed a shave, both of them were paranoid lunatics, and both of them resigned after being charged with subverting their country’s constitution, high treason, mass murder, genocide, crimes against humanity, manslaughter, use of rape as a weapon of oppression, conspiracy, violations of international law, willful abrogation of national treaties, constructive theft, burglary, obstruction of justice, misappropriation of funds, embezzlement, necrophilia, pederasty, child pornography, sheep-shagging, drug smuggling, setting fire to cute furry animals, shooting Bambi’s mother and spitting on the sidewalk. Coincidence? I think not!
The post about my dear brother Rob Roy and nephew Jason chasing and/or being chased by a sasquatch in Olympic National Park drew a scad of mostly supercilious e-mails informing me that, contrary to my ill-advised implications, the damn things are real, and I ought to shut up about them until I know better. I now have an impressive collection of sasquatch-related digital photographs that arrived attached to many of those e-mails, none of which, I hasten to observe, has an actual sasquatch in it. On that note, I would request that, if you simply must send me a picture of a plaster casting that’s obviously a bear paw track, while vociferously insisting it’s a sasquatch foot print, or anything similar, for that matter, please attach digital photos in the JPG, TIFF, GIF or other similar compressed formats. The percentage of these rubes who sent me e-mails with multi-megabyte bitmap photos attached was simply astounding, and it damn near blew up my mailbox.
Droves of young ladies (and quite a few presumably gay young men) wrote in to agree with Paisley that Joe Biden is one sexy hottie hunkeroo, and several of the women asked for Paisley’s e-mail address, in order to write her and find out how they can get to Joe and take their own shot at having his baby, since, as the post relates, Cerise and I talked Paisley out of doing the honors. I’ve forwarded those messages to Paisley, ladies, but I can’t guarantee what she will do with them.
My account of dinner at Restaurant 1789 with my dear sister Rose and her husband Henry brought in a storm of vitriol from people who like Sarah Palin and everything she stands for, even, apparently, a significant number of such folks who had never heard of her before McCain picked her as his running mate. From them, I learned, among other interesting facts, that Sarah Palin is a) a member of the Elect 144,000 who will accompany Jesus in the war against the Anti-Christ and defeat Satan at the Battle of Armageddon; b) in direct telepathic contact with the Holy Ghost; c) blessed by the Creator with supernatural powers; and, d) much, much smarter than John McCain. Strange as it might seem, I have no problem at all believing that last one.
There was no dearth of e-mails about the post where I recounted my advice to an anonymous young swain who put his underage girlfriend in a family way, and also plenty of speculation as to his real identity. Plenty of them asked if he could have been Ms. Palin’s daughter’s beau, perhaps? In the words of that famously taciturn Yankee farmer… “can’t say.”
One thing I’ve learned for sure in the last three months is, just mention black helicopters in passing during the course of a Web log post, and you are absolutely sure to receive a slew of e-mails from people who have seen them and, furthermore, are not shy about offering their theories as to what black helicopters are all about. Jeez Louise, campers, keep a lid on it, will you? What black helicopters do is a state secret, okay? As for the rest of that post, which primarily concerned my encounter with a very inebriated former lobbyist for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, numerous correspondents upbraided me severely for not just leaving him there in the gutter the moment he confessed what he was. My reply to such criticism would be that even the most base and evil sinner is not beyond redemption, and therefore, it is incumbent upon all persons of conscience and good will to… oh, wait a minute, he was a lobbyist, wasn’t he? Yeah, I suppose they’re right – I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
My story of Jason’s and Paisley’s adventure with a gaggle of small children on an outing drew some strong rebukes from certain quarters. Inexperienced young people like Jason and Paisley, I was told, and told, I might add, by a good many readers, should never assume responsibility for so many little terrors at once. They cited the incident at Baskin Robbins, where Jason and Paisley almost lost one of the kids, plus that business about the lipstick at the petting zoo as prime examples of what can happen when ambitious baby sitters bite off more than they can chew. What I haven’t mentioned in any of my posts since then is, shortly after that delightful experience, Cerise had to spend an hour talking Paisley out of getting her tubes tied. So I think that at least one of them learned their lesson that day.
If the volume of e-mail is any indication, my post about Gretchen’s problems with the world of finance hit home with a certain resonance across just about every demographic. The American people may not be able to agree on lunch, but they sure as hell all agree that Wall Street sucks. On the other side of that issue, I got a grand total of three e-mails telling me that I have no business criticizing The Masters of the Universe, who, I was informed, really are incredibly smart and therefore beyond all responsibility for what they do. As far as I can determine, they were all written by children, probably in defense of Daddy or Mom. One of them stated that “since the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the fact that it’s fiat money is irrelevant.” I figure that one was about twelve. The other two appear to be written by somewhat younger kids – one called me a “Commie [expletive]-tard,” and the other said I’m “some kind of mud-raker, [sic] like Uptown [sic] Sinclair.” You can’t blame them, I guess – they were, undoubtedly, only repeating, as best they could, what their parents say.
Yiddish scholars took me to task for my choice of words in the post about my telephone conversation with Ben Bernanke, to which I reply that I was giving as good as I got, so gai kakhen afenyam if you don’t like it. But for the record, let me say that I really do feel for the guy, what with him ending up holding the bag and now preparing to assume his place in history as the Fed chairman who presided over the biggest financial disaster since Charles Augustus Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, but, you know what they say – leygn zikh mit hunten, oyfkumen mit floyen.
And finally, let me tell you folks – don’t mess with the Girl Scouts! Boy howdy, did I ever get a flock of flaming e-mails from those feisty females! Seriously, ladies and girls in green, I only suggested that George Dubya nationalize the Girl Scouts for sex slavery to raise that seven hundred billion dollars of bailout funds because Spenderson was just shooting down every sensible idea I threw his way during that meeting I described. I really, truly only came up with that strategy in order to get him out of my office. Of course, knowing Spenderson as I do, I knew he’d just love it and want to take it back to the White House – you have to admit, based on Dubya’s performance over the last eight years, it’s an idea with “Bush 43” written all over it. But I’m completely certain that once the initial excitement with it over there at the Oval Office dies down, and the President’s advisors examine that proposal in the cold light of day; rest assured I’m absolutely convinced that the Administration would never, ever, actually do it – well, that is, I’m pretty sure of it, I think. Regardless, I can state with confidence that I definitely believe it’s not very likely, or at least not inevitable, anyway.