WTF Is It Now?!?

BONEHEADED, INSENSITIVE QUOTE OF THE DAY
'If people don't like what I'm doing, I don't give a damn. I could be sailing around on a yacht or driving around the country.' - Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. To add insult to injury, with the stock market plunging and Americans increasingly worried about the way the administration is dealing with the economy and corporate fraud, Paul O'Neill, the administration's main voice on economic issues, was in Kyrgyzstan (from the NY Times).





"IF" ???!
[I]t is hard to imagine an administration in a worse position to deal with the crisis of confidence in American business. George W. Bush himself is a product of the cowboy end of the Sun Belt economy, and if Americans look at him and see the shadow of Enron ethics and WorldCom accounting, his effectiveness as chief executive will be undermined. Yet so far Bush has done little to separate himself from the excesses of some of his friends and campaign contributors. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to be mum about his role as chief executive of Halliburton. The secretary of the army continues to be a former Enron executive whose attempts to vindicate his behavior as a businessman have been more embarrassing than convincing. The Securities and Exchange Commission continues to be run by the former lawyer for the accounting industry.

The most chilling result in last week's New York Times/CBS News Poll was that 45 percent of respondents said they thought "other people are really running the government" - exactly the percentage that said the president was in charge. That is no way to run a White House when the nation's worst domestic problem is a lack of confidence in its economic and political leaders. - From the NY Times, reprinted here.