Red, White and Blue Tag Sale

If you want to know what's really going to drive the coming elections, there is no better sage than the sarcastic queen herself, Maureen Dowd, to lay it all out in easy to understand "See Dick Run" sophistication.

I recommend you read her column today (New York Times registration required). It is the perfect companion to the news article I just posted earlier today. And, I must ad, her column gave me a few bits of inspiration for the essay I posted directly before this.

Here are three apropos paragraphs from her column, entitled Red, White and Blue Tag Sale:

Two decades ago, we fretted that Japan was taking over America when Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought a chunk of Rockefeller Center. But they overpaid for everything.

Now, because of Wall Street’s overreaching, our economy depends on foreign oil and foreign loans to stay afloat.

China and Arab countries have a staggering amount of treasury securities. And the oil-rich countries are sitting on so many petrodollars that they are looking beyond prestige hotels and fashion labels and taking advantage of the fire sale to buy eye-popping stakes in our major financial institutions.

And then there's this humdinger Maureen quotes from Warren the Buffett:

As Warren Buffett has said, we are giving ourselves a party to feed our appetite for oil and imported goods and paying for it by selling off the furniture, our most precious assets.

Oh, by the way, if I am not mistaken, kiddies, it may have been Mr. Buffett, who helped get us into this mess 20-plus years ago by pushing the notion to corporate CEOs that the only obligation of public businesses was to please their shareholders -- not their employees, not their customers, nor their communities, nor even their country. He made a lot of money for himself and several thousand of his devotees before he told his children they weren't getting any of it -- oh, by the way -- more recently. A fine howdy-do that must have been.

At least Mr. Buffett is using his latter years to try to lead the rest of us out of this wasteland of milk and honey he first led us into. Sometimes I think I'd rather have a golden calf, personally. I guess his kids will have to find their way out on their own.

First posted 1-20-08 on the original Whistling Dog.