Yellen at the Top of My Lungs

Politico just reported that numerous Biden Cabinet appointees are beneficiaries of the "revolving door" pattern whereby people go from business to government to business and back again.  In particular his Treasury nominee, Janet Yellen, has been paid $7.2 million to speak to Wall Street and other large corporations in just the past two years.  The report also mentioned Anthony Blinken and Avril Haines, but Yellen took in the most, and was featured in the lede.  So of course numerous Democratic trolls are attacking Politico for objecting to a woman's being paid fairly for her "intellectual property."  Would you pick on a man for doing it? they demanded.  Well, yes, I would: the left has criticized past presidents for cashing in after they left office, and not just presidents.

I think my favorite is Ronald Reagan, who was paid $2 million for a one-week junket to Japan in 1989, $1 million of that sum for just one speech.  But you know that killjoy leftists picked on a poor old retired man trying to earn some pin money with his "intellectual property" (an oxymoron where Reagan was concerned).  The Washington Post sympathized at the time:

And yet, for those who remembered Reagan in the White House, it was strange to see him so stripped of the powers of the presidency. There was no Air Force One, no phalanx of Secret Service, no Baker, Deaver and Meese, no White House spin doctors to tell the press what the president really meant to say. Reagan arrived at one banquet with a trumpet fanfare but no "Hail to the Chief," and left to the bittersweet strains of a Mozart string quartet. He was more on his own than he had been in eight years.

What a guy.  Makes you cry.  And I did.

Jon Schwarz made a typically good point: 

Democrats always say this about their favs — sure, they've cashed in *out of office*, but it will have no effect on their actions. So...why shouldn't Wall Street be able to give bags of cash to Yellen & co while they're *in office*? They're incorruptible!

Might as well.

My favorite take on the Yellen story, though, comes from David J. Rothkopf, a writer who I think blocked me on Twitter some time ago, but now that my account has been suspended I can see him again:

Would you rather she'd taken a vow of poverty and spent her non-government work time sitting in a convent scribbling formulas with a quill pen?  Is she, a woman who devoted her life to an incredibly distinguished career in academia & public service, not entitled to earn a living?

This is like the Catholics who try to rebut criticisms of papal ostentation by accusing you of wanting the Holy Father to starve in the gutter.  The idea that Yellen might earn a living by working -- say, two minimum-wage jobs with no benefits, as so many Americans must do these days.  A year or two spent living paycheck to paycheck would give her lived experience that would make her a better Treasury Secretary.  Speaking to big corporations isn't earning money, and it's absurd for Rothkopf to pretend it is.

These Snowflakes Don't Melt!

There was a TV tuned to CNN while I was standing in line at Subway yesterday, and I noticed that Van Jones was on.  I see that Jones is now a CNN commentator, the role he was born to play, which means that somewhere along the line this "grassroots insider," who was briefly a "White House insider" and became a grassroots outsider again, is now a corporate insider.  Only in America!

Thanks to closed-captioning I could follow what Jones was saying.  HuffPost provides a partial transcript:

“When he ran he was this tough guy,” Jones said Thursday night on “Anderson Cooper 360.” “This guy who’s going to get things done, this great negotiator.”

He continued:

“He was Trumpzilla. He was going to make Washington bow down. He was going to drain the swamp. Now he’s President Snowflake. Everything he says, ‘Oh, they’re mean to me, and they don’t like me, and I just don’t understand it and it’s not fair.’”

Jones said that kind of talk might appeal to Trump’s base, but to everyone else, “he looks increasingly bizarre.”

“It turns out you don’t have Trumpzilla,” he concluded. “You’ve got President Snowflake."

Jones is still cute, and still dumb.  I doubt that he remembers his own snowflake moments of a few years back (via):

What you saw going on was a right wing in sheer panic mode. They threw out the rule book. And you had provocateurs like Glenn Beck, Breitbart, Andrew Breitbart, now the late, stepping forward and basically taking a relatively advanced information system and firing into it lies, smears, viruses, for which we had no antibodies. So they bug-zapped me. They bug-zapped ACORN, and knock out the entire Democratic Party "get out the vote" operation with one video. They go after Shirley Sherrod. And for several months, the body politic does not know how to react to this virus. Finally, with Shirley Sherrod, a line gets drawn, and people begin to realize, "Wait a minute, it turns out you can have people on national television saying crazy stuff like that and getting away with it." And eventually, with the advertising boycott, he gets pushed off the air. But there was a moment when the White House itself was rocked back on its heels, because we had an information system that was very advanced, but a wisdom system that had not yet caught up to what tricksters like Beck and Breitbart could do. And so, that’s the moment that we were in.

As I remarked at the time, the Obama administration's failure to anticipate and recognize right-wing hostility (which began as soon as Obama became a national figure, long before he became President) was a crucial failure of competence: they just didn't understand it and it wasn't fair. What Jones calls "panic mode" was also typical of right-wing media during the Clinton administration and earlier; but this sort of convenient tactical amnesia is common in mainstream political discourse: whatever happened to civility?  Of course that kind of talk appealed to Obama's base, so he didn't have to indulge in it himself very much; his devotees took this line and ran with it.  Since Obama threw Jones and Shirley Sherrod to the sharks, the Democrats have largely decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and moved into full-blown panic mode themselves.