Maureen Dowd makes a surprisingly good point about Tim Geithner’s tax problems:
How does a guy on the fast track to be Treasury secretary fail to pay $34,000 worth of federal taxes ($43,200, including interest), or forget to check on the immigration status of a house cleaner — the same sort of upstairs-downstairs slip-up that has tripped up other top-drawer prospects on their way to top jobs here? Americans expect the man who’s in charge of the I.R.S. to pay his own taxes.
As Dowd goes on to note, it sort of cuts into to too-smart-for-school aura that has grown around in-coming Administration:
Geithner’s transgressions may seem petty given the kind of transgressions that have taken place in the Bush administration, and given the dire warnings of Obama’s choice for budget director, Peter Orszag, that the end may be nigh if the U.S. continues to spend beyond its means.
But Obama has proselytized about a shiny new kind of politics, and it’s déjà vu all over again with the smart being dumb, the rich being greedy, the powerful being sketchy.
Change you can believe in !
Somehow the reality based crowd would have made what kind of noise if this had been Palin or Joe the plumber? But being the usually corrupt dhimmies we get the same old, nothing to see here.
Change, hope, corruption & lies.
“Americans expect the man who’s in charge of the I.R.S. to pay his own taxes.”
Apparently he did indeed fill out his own forms in that case, using some tax-prep software, which should have automatically flagged this, which tends to indicate something more than a simple mistake.