Rep. Jim Clyburn, the Democratic Whip from South Carolina said the other day that one of the conditions for a bailout of the US auto industry ought to be that the people who guided it into a wall ought to be held responsible for doing so, and lose their jobs not just cut their salaries.
“We need to have new leadership. That’s what we would do if we had this kind of failure on a football field. We would be getting a new coach [and] sometimes a new athletic director,” he said. “We need to clean house with these guys and bring in new people.”
I can’t say that I disagree with that. Why would you want to leave the same miserable failures in place to continue screwing up? I suspect that any number of Clyburn’s colleagues in the House and Senate might share his views, although I don’t remember hearing much about the need to oust the CEOs of financial institutions when they came looking for government money.
I wonder why hardly anyone ever took to that idea when someone incompetent was running the country, though?
[If someone from South Carolina happens to read this, they should drop Clyburn’s office a note to let him know that the link to the Congressional Black Caucus on his Memberships page is bad. I can’t use his web form because I’m not from SC, and I’m not going to lie about my ZIP on a government web site.]