Thanks to Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker we can wrap up the week with a laugh about the trillion dollar coin. Tim Geithner advised the President that the coin may be needed and so the President submitted to posing for it.
As a leader and commander-in-chief, he could have told the staff and photographer, “Get it set up. I am coming in for 15 minutes. Make it good.”
But, he didn’t do that. In the Obama approach, he asked the staff to prepare the process, and that he would support it under advisement that the coin would be needed with a greater than 50% chance. The staff notified Treasury and they lined up one of their official photographers and they carted everything to a location in the White House. The chief of staff put everything on hold so the President could be correctly positioned and repositioned. I supposed that he may have had to change shirts, ties, jackets, etc.
Oh Mr. Obama, you protesteth too much.
Borowitz suggested that Biden should take on the task next time. The President must be reminded that the Vice President is already working debt reduction, immigration, and gun control. He’s too busy.
No, the chore should have been given to Timothy Geithner himself. He has been single handedly managing the war on terror. The Geithner coin would have riled the Republicans no end.
It might have gotten a debt limit rise out of them.
“OBAMA FURIOUS HE WASTED WEEK POSING FOR COIN
Posted by Andy Borowitz
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Barack Obama was “totally furious” he spent a week of his time posing for a trillion-dollar platinum coin that would never be minted, a White House source confirmed today.
“The President is a super-busy man, so it’s understandable that he’d be mad,” the source said. “It’s not like he has time to sit still for hours on end for a coin that’s not going to happen.”
Mr. Obama devoted much of last week to posing for the trillion-dollar coin on the assurances of outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who told Mr. Obama that the coin had “a way better than fifty percent chance” of being minted.
Based on Mr. Geithner’s advice, Mr. Obama carved hours out of his schedule to pose for the ill-fated coin, even cutting short meetings with world leaders such as Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But even as he posed for it, Mr. Obama seemed “fidgety and skeptical” that the platinum coin would ever see the light of day.
“He was like, ‘Look, I’ve got things to do. Is this coin really going to happen, because if not, this whole thing is really messed up,’” the source said.
When Mr. Geithner delivered the news to the President that the coin idea had been scrapped, according to the source, “to say that things got ugly would be a massive understatement.”
The coin fiasco behind him, Mr. Obama has now apparently learned his lesson, the source said: “If this coin idea ever comes up again, he’s going to make Biden pose for it.”
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