Word: stockman
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...short, Stockman is resting on the "I'm a moron" defense. How could he be expected to notice that the entire American auto industry was collapsing around him? Don't confuse him with the facts: He was optimistic! You got a problem with optimism, you miserable government bureaucrats...
...repeating itself, the second time as farce. It's Max Bialystock, the crooked Broadway impresario in The Producers, after getting caught ripping off old ladies with Springtime for Hitler, trying the same con behind bars with Prisoners of Love. More to the point, it's Reagan as described in Stockman's own book: sunny and optimistic and never allowing himself to be confused by the facts...
...Recycling Old Tricks Stockman appears to be a serial book cooker. Even after he admitted during the Reagan Administration to playing games with how much came in and how much went out, he can't stop himself from doing it again. In The Triumph of Politics, he describes two tricks the Reaganites (including himself) used to deceive the public about the fiscal condition of the U.S. government. One was the "magic asterisk," used to bury wishful-thinking revenue assumptions in the footnotes, where it was hoped that nobody would discover them. This is essentially similar to the "round trip" loans...
...federal prosecutor who brought the charges seems to agree with Stockman that he truly believed that if he could buy a bit more time, he could turn things around. But that's no defense if you buy time by defrauding people. The pathological optimists who have controlled the federal Treasury for most of the past three decades may also be sincere, but that is also no excuse for the deficits they have produced...
...Stockman noted 20 years ago, phony accounting and disingenuous prognostication are not illegal when you are running the government. We don't hold the director of the Office of Management and Budget to the same standard that we hold the chairman of a failing automobile-parts manufacturer. That's fortunate for many here in Washington and unfortunate for the guy who probably thought that after running the government, running the parts manufacturer would be easy...