The Unfunny Comedy Of Errors by Tim Siggia

The Unfunny Comedy Of Errors

By Tim Siggia

February 06, 2009

"It is entirely my fault." -- General Robert E. Lee, after the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863

"I screwed up." -- President Barack Obama, after the withdrawal of former South Dakota senator Tom Daschle from nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services, February 3, 2009

Having assumed the presidency with probably more fanfare than would even be accorded the Second Coming, Barack Obama had a lot to live up to, and, judging by the treatment he has up to now been getting from the "mainstream" media, it would seem he already had become America's greatest president simply by taking the oath of office. (So momentous was this particular presidency, in fact, that the presidential oath had to be administered twice.) But alas, Obama, as it turns out, is not God after all. Neither is he Abraham Lincoln. Or John F. Kennedy. Or even Martin Luther King. He is simply an ordinary man who was fast-tracked from the Illinois state senate through the United States Senate and thrust into the presidency, ill-prepared to meet the demands of America's top job.

First of all, credit must be given where it is due. Obama's candor in this matter of appointments is refreshing and deeply appreciated. It takes a man, after all, to own up to his failures and hold himself accountable. Bill Clinton never would have done it. He would have made excuses, then put the blame on anybody but himself -- and the sycophantic puppet news media would have rubber-stamped those excuses. But then Clinton is a man only in the physical sense. In every other respect he is very much the eternal boy. These things having been said, this whole business of appointments has turned out to be a comedy of errors about as funny as Al Franken on Good Friday.

Not that all Obama's picks have been bad ones. His latest, in fact, former New Hampshire governor and United States senator Gregg Judd to be Secretary of Commerce, is an excellent one -- and, it must be noted, an unexpected one, what with Judd's not only being a Republican, but one with a strong record of fiscal conservatism as well. It must be remembered, however, that Judd never would have gotten this nomination had not the original nominee for this post, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, been forced to withdraw his nomination on account of his being the subject of a federal investigation in his home state. Add to the list the withdrawal of Nancy Killefer as government performance officer for the same reason as Daschle -- non-payment of taxes -- and it adds up to a total of three Obama nominees forced to rescind their nominations due to their discovered unfitness for their respective posts. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for a presidency which had promised to be squeaky-clean when it came to ethics -- an eerie reminder of another president who had similarly promised to give us "the most ethical administration in history." Like his promise of a "middle-class tax cut" -- another echoed by Obama in his 2008 campaign -- that Clinton promise never materialized either.

In addition to those nominees already mentioned, there are two more which deserve serious scrutiny. The first is that of Eric Holder as Attorney General. Holder was recently confirmed by the Senate along party lines. Not a single Republican voted for his confirmation, and with good reason. As deputy attorney general during the Clinton years, it was Holder who was the driving force behind Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, who secretly engaged in trade with countries like Iran who were under embargo at the time, and, upon being discovered, became a fugitive from justice who relinquished his American citizenship. In a similar vote, the Senate also confirmed Timothy Geithner, yet another tax cheat, to be Secretary of the Treasury. O. Henry in his best writing days could have never concocted such irony as this. These people who are so cavalier with regard to their own taxes are the very same ones who would raise taxes on the rest of us.

With the appointment process now drawing mercifully to a close, Act Two of the Unfunny Comedy has in the meantime already begun, with the congressional wrangling over the proposed $800 billion "stimulus package." Enough comparisons to Roosevelt's New Deal have been made already. I refer again to my departed father, who, with his high school education, was a far wiser man than those currently serving in the halls of Congress with all their Ivy League degrees and other accolades. Something he told me early on is that the idea of borrowing your way out of debt makes no sense whatsoever. In this regard, George W. Bush and Barack Obama both could have learned something from him.