Wow. Senator Susan Collins of Maine just announced that she will be voting against making tax cheat Timothy Geithner our next Treasury Secretary on ethical grounds.
Always good to see spine at the squishy end of GOP—over anything, really. I just wish someone had organized all of the potential votes against Geithner, Clinton, and Holder—and done that famous Senate horsetrading to make sure that at least one of the three goes down. Personally, I think Holder is the biggest problem, both ethically and politically. He is also the most easily replaced. Liberal lawyers with agendas and government experience are a dime a dozen. Clinton is clearly the most venal. But she is bulletproof. Geithner will do the least harm of the three, unacceptable negligence notwithstanding.
I never understood what the real anti-Geithner argument was based on, other than the simplicity of the "head of IRS can't do his taxes" NY Post-style headline. I mean, did people think Geithner was deliberately evasive? Possibly -- though not likely, since he's a millionaire who skimped on $36K, all of which he ended up paying -- but if so, "negligence" wouldn't be the operative word here. So then, did people think he was just dumb? The dude isn't exactly a random guy off the street, and if he was passed over as Treasury Secretary, he'd still have a massive role in the future of this debacle as head of the New York Fed. Either direction you go has tons of easily-pokeable holes. Plus, if you're a conservative, you were not going to do much better than Geithner. He's about as middle-of-the-road as an Obama economics appointee is gonna get.
