Obama on the Potomac

I visited the Civil War battlefield at Antietam Creek on the way back from Ohio this weekend and was touched by the somber setting and the opportunity to learn of that terrifying event. The carnage of the war’s bloodiest battle (over 20,000 dead) is easy to imagine as the fields and woods are kept roughly as they were on September 17, 1862—there’s even a whitewashed, stone smokehouse that remains standing on the old Mumma farm just as it did when Robert E. Lee made his first attempt to invade the North. (Gettysburg was his second and last.) Chirping birds and ground hogs the size of small elk are the only signs of life on the landmark site.

In the car radio all along the route to and from the battleground in the western Maryland mountains, I got an earful about the A.I.G. execs helping themselves to our money. It appears that Obama’s managers were slow to react to the outrage and haven’t yet realized that the country is feeling a tad murderous about the continued looting of the national treasury to feed the greed of these arrogant pricks. Timothy Geithner seems not to have much of a feel for the pulse of the nation, despite his extensive training at Kissinger & Associates, the International Monetary Fund and the Clinton White House.

At the head of the Army of the Potomac in 1862 was George B. McClellan. He was an expert general and had observed campaigns in the Crimea, spoke French and had broad knowledge of the logistics involved in equipping and mobilizing large armies. He once wrote a manual on cavalry tactics.

Lincoln kept General McClellan in charge of the battle at Antietam despite the latter’s miserable failure to smack Lee down during the Peninsula campaign in first year of the war. McClellan was cautious and overestimated the size of Lee’s army, but his timidity was political as well as military. McClellan, like many northerners, wasn’t sure that the southern white elite should be crushed, despite their treasonous assault on the nation. McClellan, who later ran against Lincoln on the antiwar Democratic ticket, was also quite comfortable with slavery and assured slaveowners in what later became West Virginia that he wasn’t about to touch their ‘property’.

Obama fished Timothy Geithner out of the murky waters of Washington-New York high finance where he clearly developed a low opinion of things like income taxes, given his disinclination to pay them. When he talks, he sounds like any of the interchangeable Republicrat suits trained to answer questions by divulging no information. His ascent to high office was built on an appropriate number of Indonesian, Korean and Thai backs as the IMF and the Clintonians spooned up disastrous fiscal medicine during the 1990s Asian financial panic and added greatly to human misery in that part of the world.

McClellan hurried west from Washington to cut off Lee’s audacious attempt to march into Pennsylvania and seize Harrisburg, further undermining the North’s will to fight after the string of Union defeats. Despite having stumbled upon a copy of Lee’s battle plan, McClellan settled for a draw and failed to deliver the knock-out blow that could have shortened the Civil War by three years. Lee’s army escaped back across the Potomac.

Lincoln was indignant and had had enough with his lukewarm commander. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and cashiered McClellan for good.

Geithner helped salvage the crumbling financial system by arranging the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns last March and is believed to have played a big part in the A.I.G. bailout. His co-consul Lawrence Summers bleated pitfully over the weekend that top bankers’ contracts are Sacred Documents that, sadly, must be respected at all costs—or roughly $180 million out of our threadbare pockets. Those objecting—or raising distractions like their own labor and pension contracts—simply don’t understand the subtle nuances of finance and should trust Daddy.

As the sans-culottes gather at the gates of their local Wal-Marts, cobblestones and pitchforks (but not paychecks) in hand, one wonders whether the president from Springfield, Illinois, is ready to heave these stale, preening overseers into the dustbin of history and bring us victory.