What the...why have I not been reading this daily? A clue: I'm an idiot!

While waiting for Godot this morning, I stumbled on the following --

And this isn’t about vengeance, it’s about policy: if the “consequence” for blowing a $4 trillion hole in the economy is seeing masses of government officials line up to hurl billions of taxpayer dollars at you, that doesn’t provide much of an incentive to fix your behavior. This is one area where there should have been a seamless melding of public outrage and government policy: we should have swooped in, rounded up 200 of the most guilty executives, hauled them before congress in a public trial, and packed them all off to a Supermax in Florence, Colorado to do real time with murderers, rapists and terrorists. Reality shows should have been quickly greenlighted to track their progress in the hole (can you imagine the ratings for a show called Project D-Block starring John Thain, Angelo Mozilo and Dick Fuld?).

Ouch. That stings, that really stings. We've all thought something like that, and occasionally witness something like that, but not consistently...and then, and then...the next paragraph.

All joking aside, this would have been an incredibly healthy step for our society to take — just as it would have been healthy (and still might be) for someone to go to jail for torture during the Bush years, or for contracting fraud in Iraq, or for any of the other countless crimes committed this past decade that will almost certainly go unpunished. The social contract has to be considered broken when some dumb schmuck can go to jail for five real years for selling a bag of weed while a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and had all possible advantages gets nothing but a bailout and a temporarily lowered bonus regime for destroying billions of dollars of public wealth.

As for the credit card companies, fuck them. The biggest of them are engaged in one of the all-time great scams right now, gorging themselves on cheap money lent to them by the Fed or the government via bailout programs and then turning right around and further widening their spread by increasing prices to the ordinary consumer. Imagine an oil company that got to buy government crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a discount during the Katrina crisis and then turned around and gouged consumers during the shortage.

One article, two paragraphs on the fact that Populist Rage, oft railed against by media and brie-eating, lace underwear wearing twits on the right -- does Steve Forbes have nightmares about Mother Jones and Joe Hill? -- in a motherfucking blog. Granted, it's a blog consisting largely of quality articles and short takes written by Matt Taibbi, but none the less.

The guy writes well, very well and has a taste for the other guy's liver, perhaps with fava beans with a nice cabernet. Or, given the catholicity of his subjects and interests - the guy is a not so Gonzo reincarnation of Hunter S Thompson -- a cheeseburger and a whiskey coke in a biker bar along 101, or maybe both! Consider this, from another article on page 1 of the blog:

There are some jobs in this world that are really, really hard to screw up. If the title on your business card reads something like “Mrs. Aristotle Onassis” or “Mrs. Prince Rainier of Monaco” or “Mrs. Bald-and-Sweaty International Arms-Trading Gazillionaire Adnan Khashoggi” — if you need a team of Sherpas just to carry the credit cards issued in your name — it’s probably not unreasonable to assume that you know a thing or two about shopping.

Of course society is going to give you a pass if you don’t know a whole lot about more useful stuff, like how to feed the poor, calibrate ground-to-air missiles, or dredge the Duluth shipping canal. But if you’re six or seven years into one of those marriages and you still don’t know how to buy a fur coat or a Fendi handbag, we’re all going to have to assume you’re completely brainless, a cabbage in heels.

And would you blame us, Brian Cashman? Because objectively speaking, the job of New York Yankees general manager should be the single most failure-proof position not only in sports but in all of human society. Giving a normal, red-blooded, pattern-baldness-suffering American male access to the Steinbrenner fortune and asking him to buy 25 baseball players a year in an unregulated market is no different, in any meaningful way, from handing Sarah Jessica Parker a blank check and asking her to fill a three-bedroom apartment with shoes and dresses. And we’re not even asking her to get good deals. All we ask is that the outfits match.

Now, it might be because despite some fondness for a few teams, I'm really a lifelong Yankee fan. Growing up in Syracuse, people either followed Cleveland, Boston, or the Yanks. Our home team was a Yankee farm team, and I saw people like Bobby Murcer and Thumond Munson wolfing down pizza and draft Gennesse or Utica Club several tables over at Twin Trees Pizza. I don't get insane when they lose in the playoffs or the Series, and Rudy Guiliani's posturing is a curse but I learned to love the game when Whitey, Yogi, Bobby, Tony, Moose and Clete ran the infield and the outfield was anchored by Rog, the Mick and Tom Tresh. Although I was in the Shire of Ectopia during the series run and was following the Mariners day to day, I wasn't surprised when despite heroics, they knocked the Mariners out in 2006 and again in 2001. I think the best moment of the recent series was when Brett Boone was in the booth, and his kid brother hit a walk-off homerun to knock Boston out...and then, they lost to somebody else. Arizona, maybe?

That said, the Yankee's have been cursed now with an almost 40 year reign of insanity. Showalter built the team that Torre made very special, and the rest is now ancient history. And, Taibbi nails it...chemistry, since, hunger are all things that we don't have and haven't had lately on the Yankees.

Now, whenever I happen on Matt's writing, I enjoy it. But, stumbling on this blog makes me happy...

Comments

[drip]

I wish I could not to like Taibbi because he is so young and talented, but it's just not possible. When he writes stuff like this, which I stumbled on yesterday, I have to just admire his talent and try to do better. He's right about Cashman, but his boyo, Apesuit Theo, is just a Cashman wannabe who was reigned in at the early part of his career by Larry Lucchino. Yes, it was the D-Backs with Schilling and The Big Unit and Luis Gonzalez, bless his steroid lovin' heart got the hit that beat the unbeatable Rivera. I would also say that it was the Stick who put the team that won the 4 straight together while George was in his second forced retirement for illegal tampering.

[drip]

http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html Link referred to at "this, which ..." above.