The Gelb Standard

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 18th, 2010


Observations:


1) Your subscribers indicate that they are suspicious about the agenda of Maria Bartiromo. It just seems that she is an undisclosed lobbyist. I’m bored with picking apart her take on things, suffice it to say you are hearing Mitt Romney accurately channeled in this appearance.


My prediction is that one of these non disclosure checks is going to reveal that Maria Bartiromo is on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or the national association of corporate raiding hedge fund managers (I made that up). No one believes that anything she says is actually an opinion but instead a sales job.


The disturbing thing is besides the ubiquitous appearances on Morning Joe, she has that Wall Street Journal show, and her CNBC platform. It just appears we have given the megaphone to the voice of corporate greed and no distortion is too fuzzy to serve the bottom line of those individuals who are most benefiting from the transfer of wealth created by the current mix of status quo politics and government funded banking guarantees to proprietary investment.


Maybe its good to have Maria on Morning Joe, the same way Rachel and Keith have an intern monitor Glenn and Bill. We should let her come on the show and rant pro Wall Street-isms, it’s a gold mine of self serving hypocrisy, and you can’t get Harold anymore, who at least cloaked his allegiance expertly.


2) I am so happy to hear that the Howard Dean appearance yesterday had the same effect on Joe Scarborough that it did on me. There are guests and there are guests. Funny, I didn’t hear any reflections on the Kaine appearance, but Dean made sound bites that hit you.


I was less happy that that reflection wasn’t connected to the now 11 Senators pushing for a tough reconciliation health mandate. I think these elements are distinctly connected. It seems that simultaneous to the ramp up to the health care summit on February 25th, there are two legislative versions of events being attempted. In addition to the public option reconciliation dagger, there is the resuscitation of the existing bill with the necessary changes. But in standard Washington D.C. ice cube demonstrata, that resuscitation effort can’t seem to find closure and current estimates indicate that again the legislature will fail to deliver a signable action by the summit, leaving the Republicans with leverage that could’ve been avoided or turned.


This is Democratic cannibalism. It is the weakness Dr. Dean spoke of incarnate. And funny enough at the center of the failure is the void where the President or Tom Daschle, or Howard Dean should be.


I say that staffing shortcoming analysis fully briefed on the apparent conflict of interest charges levied at both Daschle (United Health) and Dean (Pharma). I await comment from them or a second source to decide whether they are of limited effectiveness because of it, but it couldn’t be any worse than the horrible deals Rahm Emmanuel made with both organizations directly on behalf of the White House.


3) That leads me to Les Gelb. No I don’t want Zbigeniew Brzezinski empowered to replace Jim Jones. But I do subscribe to a multi front catastrophic failure of strategic planning complete with pictures of Jones, Axelrod, Gibbs, Summers, and Emmanuel.


I think more important than cleaning house are teachable moments. If you do as Gelb says, it’s no longer an Obama administration. It could be said that the first 45 days and last 2 years of Goerge W Bush’s tenure were actually GHW Bush administrations by proxy. No, it’s more important to salvage the talents of Axelrod and Emmanuel, to harness the Economic regime, pathing Austen Goolsbee for eventual ascension, and to enable Jones.


Emmanuel should consider doing what Mike Dunleavy did last month, fire himself, but retain partial ownership of the continuing project. He should go get the best chief of staff possible (DEAN, DASCHLE) and stay on in an advisory role so that its boot to the throat time, but still Obama’s ship.


I think, as I always have, that Summers is the obvious plank walker. You can actually thank Summers for being there when you needed a guy to keep Goldman Sachs from engineering a depression, for they are at that scale at this point, but point to a future where we need to get rid of the government lending to investment banks and too big to fail. I don’t know that we could dress up Elizabeth Warren to look like Maria Bartiromo, I don’t know that Volcker is any more a solution than Brzezinski. I know Goolsbee would be more of the same tough sledding until his time has come in an earned fashion.


If there is one thing consensus (minus Maria) could find, it’s that having the government seem like a department of Goldman Sachs had better go the way of the dodo bird in the next 90 days or get ready for Romney 2012 with his new economic advisor: Lloyd Blankfein.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.


{ed.- don’t miss the point on the Warren / Bartiromo thing, dress up means to not scare Wall Street into a catastrophic tantrum, not any superficial definition}