A Trillion Here, A Trillion There...

Trillion Dollar Baby
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 10, 2009
According to Maureen Dowd, The One is no longer walking on water.

So much for the savior-based economy.

While not quite a Rude Name®, for the second time the Treasury Secretary has been called "laconic", an adjective previously used on the iconic bionic Barack.

Tim Geithner, the learned and laconic civil servant and financial engineer, did not sweep in and infuse our shaky psyches with confidence.

And I'm not quite sure what to make of "shaky psyche". It's not quite a full Alliteration Alert® like "learned and laconic", but sure tries to be one. And she practically accuses Geithner of not quite making it past puberty.

For starters, the 47-year-old’s voice kept cracking.

But perhaps inspired by Joseph Lowery's Inauguration invocation, she raps rhyming with:

Despite the touting, the Treasury chief unveiled a plan short on illumination, recrimination, fine points and foreclosure closure.

Which leads to Dowd's current favorite whipping boys, clueless billionaires. She whips out a Crossword Clue™ that hasn't been part of her vocabulary since the Clintons had just vacated the White House:

Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whinge about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage.

The nuance of "complaining fretfully" just nails the weary whining of the increasingly defensive banks. And Maureen sees Treasury Tim as one of the insiders protecting the Wall Street wailers.

Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets.

The Maureen Dowd Anti-Banker Crusade continues. Today she makes more luxury item metaphors.

The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world.

She renews her call for heads to roll.

And these impervious, imperial suits who squander taxpayers’ money after dragging the country over the cliff should all be fired...

That is after they take a pay cut.

The pay of all the employees in bailed-out banks, not just top executives, should be capped.

The right wingers and the finance industry apologists will tut-tut that Maureen just doesn't understand the compensation packages of the privileged class. Perhaps. But she knows a populist parade when she leads one.