The Wait

I haven’t felt much like writing on this blog lately, and you all know what I am talking about.

It’s bad enough to have to listen to the evil-minded, demagogic, professional know-nothings whipping up the crazed biped masses over Obama’s fairly wimpy health reform plans.

But it is downright depressing to keep watching for the appearance of Mr O’s BALLS and not finding them.

If there isn’t a turn-around soon, the healthcare reform fight is going to turn into a fiasco that will make Obama look like a half-dozen bumbling Clintons rolled into one. I mean, my God, the man and his party have a huge mandate, 60 U.S. senators, a comfortable margin in the House, a devastating economic crisis opening people’s minds to the idea of C-H-A-N-G-E. And with all that he can’t ram a half-decent social reform through Congress?

Worst of all, he doesn’t look like he really wants to.

Obama’s limp-ass response to the double-barreled assault on reason from his enemies (not adversaries, enemies) makes him look like an ineffective leader and the worst kind of Harvard-bred academic with no street smarts and no idea of how to deliver a knuckle sandwich. I know it got him elected, but that was then.

Even the business types are seeing him this way. Try on this revealing commentary from a website called ‘nakedcapitalism.com’ no less:

His banking policy, which is vital to recovery, became hostage to Geithner and Summer’s deep loyalty to the industry and his lack of interest in rocking any boats. All Team Obama has done on the banking front is write a lot of blank checks, hold some bogus ‘stress tests’ in lieu of doing the real thing, and raise a stink on a few symbolic issues to try to paper over the failure to embark on real and badly needed reforms. . . . We could use someone at the helm who is willing to plot a course and stick with it, and instead what we have is someone long on charisma and short on resolve’.

I would add that the charisma is going to dissipate very shortly if there isn’t something other than the endless, and endlessly annoying, appeals to hold hands and sing.

Not incidentally, there is more and more buzz in the blogosphere that the famous ‘recovery’ from the economic mess is a dead-cat bounce if not total bullshit. Today’s stock market tanking had some of the eternal optimists momentarily sobering up.

In addition, if you read the fine print on the latest bank failures, the figures are getting larger, and the underlying insolvency more ominous. The $25 billion Colonial Bank that collapsed last Friday was supposedly doing fine just before becoming the largest implosion since Washington Mutual last fall.

A smaller one called Community Bank of Nevada also went under with total book assets of a mere $1.52 billion. But the FDIC said CBN will cost it $781.5 million to fix—meaning over half its listed assets were worthless. How many others are out there? How much has the Geither-Summers push to dress up the banks and declare them healthy merely postponed the reckoning?

We elected Obama to clean house and do things differently. We’re waiting.