« The Micro and the Macro | Main | Pulling my back out while they pull me back in »
04 February 2009
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
Pope Benedict and Barack Obama are both saying "Sorry."
Well, the Pope actually says, "I didn't know," but gets points for making an effort to rectify his mistake. And the President tells the American people, "I’m here on television saying I screwed up and that’s part of the era of responsibility."
Posted by EDN on February 4, 2009 at 03:02 PM in Religion, Sports | Permalink
Comments
He's culpa, alright, culpa of being stupida.
I haven't been paying that much attention to the ins and outs of Obama's floundering nominations. Daschle wasn't on my radar beyond the fact that he had seemed exquisitely impotent when he was Majority Leader -- a forgettable nonentity.
You know, Obama is shaping up to have had quite a few dubious professional friendships. The Chicago crowd, Lieberman and now Daschle.
I recommend Glenn Greenwald's post from Sunday, The Daschles: feeding at the Beltway trough, http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/01/daschle/index.html. He quotes Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi (a mordant and foul-mouthed genius), http://www.rollingstone.com/blogs/taibbiunbound/2008/12/the-whore-factor.php :
"I know several reporters who are either officially or unofficially on "Whore Factor" duty, watching the rapidly kaleidoscoping transition picture and keeping track of the number of known whores and ghouls who for some reason have been invited to befoul the atmosphere of the next administration.
"Obviously there has been some dire news on that front already. When Obama picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants. In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger. True, he is probably only the second-biggest whore for the health care industry in American politics — the biggest being doctor/cat-torturer Bill Frist, whose visit to South Dakota on behalf of John Thune in 2004 was one of the factors in ending Daschle's tenure in the Senate.
"But in picking Daschle — who as an adviser to the K Street law firm Alston and Bird has spent the last four years burning up the sheets with the nation's fattest insurance and pharmaceutical interests — Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention of seriously reforming the health care industry. . . .
"Regarding Daschle, remember, we're talking about a guy who not only was a consultant for one of the top health-care law firms in the country, but a board member of the Mayo Clinic (a major recipient of NIH grants) and the husband of one of America's biggest defense lobbyists — wife Linda Hall lobbies for Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Does anyone really think that this person is going to come up with a health care proposal that in any way cuts into the profits of the major health care companies?"
Ha! Don't you just love it?
Posted by: Chiaroscuro | Feb 4, 2009 11:48:13 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
