Such is our current state of national fecklessness that the gold medal for prompt contrition by anyone on the public stage belongs, by default, to David Letterman. He wasted little time in telling a national audience point blank that he had done “something stupid,” hurt those he loved and had a “responsibility” to “try to fix it.” In the land of Rod Blagojevich and Tiger Woods, the candid late-night talk show star is king.
Woods’s apologetic Masters press conference last week came only after months of stalling, sponsor defections and well-publicized “rehab.” Along the way he briefly hired Ari Fleischer, the former Bush press secretary, to help manage his mess. Fleischer is not the only Bush spin artist to re-emerge as a hired damage-control hand in the post-Bush era. Dan Bartlett, a former presidential counselor, is a honcho at Public Strategies, the company recently enlisted by Goldman Sachs to help erase the indelible tattoo of “a great vampire squid” imprinted on its image by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.Former Bush propagandists will never lack for work in this climate.
It’s remarkable how often apologists for Wall Street’s self-inflicted calamity mirror the apologists for Washington’s self-inflicted calamity of Iraq. In the case of that catastrophic war, its perpetrators and enablers almost always give the same alibi: “Everyone” was misled by the same “bad intelligence” about Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D. Hence, no one is to blame and no one could have prevented the rush to war.
That, of course, is no more true than Greenspan’s claim that “everyone” was ignorant of the potentially catastrophic dangers in the securitization of subprime mortgages. There were dissenters in the press, intelligence agencies and Congress who did doubt the W.M.D. evidence and asked tough questions akin to those asked by financial apostates like Michael Burry during the housing bubble. But these dissenting voices were either ignored, ridiculed or censored in the feverish rally to war just as voices like Burry’s were marginalized in the feverish rally of the Dow.
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via Op-Ed Columnist – No One Is to Blame for Anything – NYTimes.com.
