Follow BeltwayBlips on Twitter
Frank Rich Mention of Tanta
Calculated Risk —
From Frank Rich at the NY Times: The Brightest Are Not Always the Best (hat tip Kevin) In our current financial quagmire, there have also been those who had the wisdom to sound alarms before Rubin, Summers or Geithner did. Among them were not just economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini but also Doris Dungey, a 47-year-old financial blogger known as Tanta, who died of cancer in Upper Marlboro, Md., last Sunday. As the Times obituary observed, “her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report ...
Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Daily Kos —
... Frank Rich: Some one had to remind everyone about David Halberstram's The Best and The Brightest, the whiz kids that got us into Vietnam. ...
Pet Peeve
Booman Tribune —
... and columns being written about how terrible it is that Obama keeps appointing Ivy Leaguers to his administrative team. Yeah, I know that JFK did the same thing and wound up with a bunch of boneheads that thought it was a great idea to invade Cuba and start another land war in Asia. George W. Bush appointed a bunch of dumbasses and drop-outs and they started two land wars in Asia. What matters is that someone learns the lessons of our recent past. If they have a brain in their head, that's probably a good sign. And if you went to Regent University, please do not ...
Tom Engelhardt: The Imperial Transition
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com —
... Everything in this "transition" is, in fact, more prodigious and more invasive than in any previous transition, including, of course, the ongoing media fascination with all those positions Obama is filling with "the best and the brightest." We're not just talking about his vast economic team or his ...
Arianna Huffington: Rewarding Those Who Got It Right
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com —
... Obama's commitment to reversing Bush Darwinism isn't as clear when it comes to his economic team. As Frank Rich notes, Obama's economic brain trust -- Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin - didn't exactly exhibit a Shinseki-like foresight when it came to the financial meltdown. ...
The Imperial Transition
Antiwar.com Original —
... Gellman explained in his book Angler on the vice-presidential 200-question vetting process by which Dick Cheney chose himself as candidate and then used private information sent in by the other candidates for his own purposes is major dossiers on about 800 people.) Everything in this "transition" is, in fact, more prodigious and more invasive than in any previous transition, including, of course, the ongoing media fascination with all those positions Obama is filling with " the best and the brightest ." We're not just talking about his vast economic team or his ...
Irony on Last Legs
TPMCafe —
... The term of the hour is "the best and the brightest," David Halberstam's brilliant coinage of 1972 meant to cast much deserved aspersions on the dazzlingly credentialed, smugly presumptuous crowd who peered through ivied tunnels to run foreign policy under JFK and LBJ, again and again counseling them to thrust the United States into the devastating Vietnam war. By 1992 Halberstam was noting, as Frank Rich wrote a few months ago, that the term "is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.'' Ya think? ...
