Timothy Geithner, the former secretary of the
Treasury Department, says the White House wanted him to lie in scheduled
appearances on the Sunday TV talk shows.
As Geithner writes in his new memoir:
“I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I
appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me
to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. It wasn’t a main
driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line
was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to
explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we
intended to protect Social Security.”
Of course, Geithner would not have been the only
official from the White House to have misled the American people on the Sunday
talk shows. Susan Rice famously came under fire for blaming a
terrorist attack on a YouTube video in appearances on the shows.
Unlike most of his recent predecessors as treasury
secretary, Timothy F. Geithner had no experience on Wall Street or in corporate
America. He did not have a PhD in economics. Nor was he a politician or even a
lawyer. Far from being a presidential confidante, Geithner barely knew Barack
Obama before his nomination.
What he did bring to the job was a deep-seated
belief: Policymaking is a fundamentally tragic business, often involving choices
between two or more bad options, and the best that can be hoped for is to avoid
making matters worse.
Geithner left the administration on January 25,
2013.
Since leaving office, Geithner has been writing a
book about the response to the financial crisis that began in 2007. In November
2013, it was announced that Geithner will join the private equity firm Warburg
Pincus as president and managing director in March 2014.
It has always amazed this writer how, in this
country, those who commit serious crimes or who put the country in serious
risk, always seem to end up writing books or become consultants or become very
wealthy on a speaker’s circuit.
Wrong
doing seems to pay…
Should they not be known
by their actions, like
being called:
The King Slayer
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