Arianna Huffington: The Era of Not Getting It: Marie Antoinetts of the Meltdown

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Huffington Post
Dated Tuesday, January 27

The Era of Not Getting It: The Marie Antoinettes of the Meltdown
By Arianna Huffington

There is plenty of debate about what President Obama's stimulus bill should look like -- as well there should be, given all that is at stake. But there is a growing consensus that the guiding principle in that debate should be Obama's call for a "new era of responsibility."

Helping fuel that consensus is the saga of the rise and fall of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, the poster child for the era of irresponsibility. The condemnation of his behavior is completely bipartisan (although we haven't heard yet what John McCain thinks of one of his biggest fundrasing bundlers).

On this week's Left, Right, and Center, my conservative pal Tony Blankley made the perfect comparison: "Thain and these CEOs have been studying at the Marie Antoinette School of Public Presentation," he said. "The crassness and the stupidity are stunning... They ought to be boiled in oil."

Marie Antoinette and her "let them eat cake" became the symbol of Not Getting It -- of not realizing, until it was too late, that a new era had begun. And just like Marie Antoinette, Thain didn't get it, even as Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis was leading him to the corporate guillotine.

Read more at the link.

[Mme. Defarge]

1. No kidding! n/t

[truedelphi]

2. I was gonna add - let's lop off the heads of anyone

Who plays the system and doesn't pay their mandated share of taxes. But wait - that guy is now the head of Treasury.

Oh well. The more things change the more they stay the same.

[alsame]

3. I saw Barney Frank earlier on MSNBC and he said Thain would

have been McCain's Treasury Sec. :scared:

[nykym]

4. Not that he

doesn't deserve the guillotine or something equally horrible as a punishment but...

From http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/antoinette.htm

Marie Antoinette never actually uttered the words "Let them eat cake." We have it on the authority of biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, who spoke on the subject at the 2002 Edinburgh Book Fair.

Though historians have known better all along, it is still popularly believed that Marie, wife of Louis XVI and queen of France on the eve of the French Revolution, uttered the insensitive remark upon hearing peasants' complaints that there wasn't enough bread to go around. It is simply not true. "It was said 100 years before her by Marie-Therese, the wife of Louis XIV," Fraser explains. "It was a callous and ignorant statement and she was neither."

[bbinacan]

5. Thanks for posting this,

I was about to do the same thing.

[katty]

6. the NGI's? let them eat s*** and suffer along w/the rest of us