1/ From “The Fatal Conceit,” today’s column:

Over the past year, the bon­fire of over­con­fi­dence has shifted to Wash­ing­ton. Since the mas­ters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the mas­ters of gov­ern­ment have con­cluded (some­what illog­i­cally) that they must be really smart.

Over­con­fi­dence in gov­ern­ment also has a char­ac­ter­is­tic form: that of highly ratio­nal Olympians who attempt to stand above prob­lems and solve them in a finely tuned and impar­tial manner. In moments of gov­ern­ment over­con­fi­dence, offi­cials come to see soci­ety not as a dynamic and com­plex organ­ism, but as a machine, which can be rebuilt. In such moments, gov­er­nance and engi­neer­ing merge into one.

2/ From “Heroes and History,” a 7/17/07 column:

A com­pendium of high­lights from that GQ excerpt of Matt Latimer’s new book:

+ “‘Why did I sign on to this pro­posal if I don’t under­stand what it does?’ [the pres­i­dent] asked.”

+ “And to help get [TARP] passed, I had to endure what I con­sid­ered the biggest indig­nity of my entire White House tenure: We were now writ­ing remarks for Jimmy Carter, of all people, because we’d been aban­doned by nearly every­one else. I’m not sure if Carter ever deliv­ered that state­ment, but a week later he launched a vicious attack on Bush’s “atro­cious” eco­nomic poli­cies. It was just one more humil­i­a­tion. First the admin­is­tra­tion had had to seek out Carter’s help, and then the White House had been schooled on the econ­omy by the pres­i­dent who’d brought you gas lines, an energy crisis, and high unemployment.”

+ “It was clear, though, that the pres­i­dent, ever the skilled politi­cian, had con­cerns about the choice of Palin, which he called ‘interesting.’ That was the equiv­a­lent of call­ing a fire­works dis­play ’satisfactory.’ ‘I’m trying to remem­ber if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.’ His eyes twin­kled, then he asked, ‘What is she, the gov­er­nor of Guam?’

+ “I’d never seen him more exhausted. His hair was out of place and shaggy. His face looked drained and pale. Even more dis­tress­ing, he was wear­ing Crocs.”

Fifty-one weeks ago Yves Smith ran a post about TARP 1.0 called “Why You Should Hate the Trea­sury Bailout Proposal.” She wrote (empha­sis mine):

The Trea­sury has been using the for­mula that it will buy assets at “fair market prices”….Yet as we dis­cussed, the plan makes no sense unless the Orwellian “fair market prices” means “above market prices”….[U]nlike the Res­o­lu­tion Trust Cor­po­ra­tion, which took on dodgy assets which had fallen into the FDIC’s lap due to the fail­ure of thrifts, and the Home Owners’ Loan Cor­po­ra­tion, which was estab­lished in 1934 after the hous­ing market had bot­tomed, this pro­gram is going to swing into action with the clear but not hon­estly dis­closed intent of buying assets at above market prices when future mar­kets and the ana­lysts with the best track records on fore­cast­ing this decline (you can add Robert Shiller, CR at Cal­cu­lated Risk, and Nouriel Roubini to the list) believe it has con­sid­er­ably fur­ther to fall. As we said ear­lier, this is a covert, not par­tic­u­larly well designed, inef­fi­cient, and unduly costly recap­i­tal­iza­tion of the bank­ing system.

Thanks to a new memoir by one of George W. Bush’s speech­writ­ers–an excerpt of which appears in the new issue of GQ–we now have con­fir­ma­tion that Yves* was exactly right. Here’s Matt Latimer describ­ing the prepa­ra­tions for the President’s tele­vised Sep­tem­ber 24 speech to the nation:

[Part one of this con­ver­sa­tion is here.]

John Bradley: Now, I wonder if you could talk more about my pre­vi­ous point, if you don’t mind going back to it: that polit­i­cal fig­ures are more deserv­ing of satire. They run for public office and know­ingly enter the tor­nado zone of public wrath. Writ­ers, how­ever, don’t deserve such scorn as they are not really public fig­ures. And their book photos should be off limits. Crit­i­cize the writ­ing or lit­er­ary move­ments, but not how a writer appears. That’s too easy and per­haps cruel. And don’t epi­grams about poets, epi­grams that name par­tic­u­lar poets, rein­force in some way the figure of Authorship?

Kent John­son: Only in the sense, I’d say, that words like “queer” or “nigger” rein­force big­otry when retaken and wielded openly in the faces of the bigoted…