The Coming Storm

By Alan Abelson

The bulls are ignoring the economic realities.

Some Good Samaritan—or if there wasn’t one handy (they’re pretty scarce in Afghanistan), just about anybody at Goldman Sachs would do fine—should have informed Gen. Stanley McChrystal that a rolling stone gathers no gloss. Because no one volunteered to tell the general that trash-talking about the chief and his staff before a Rolling Stone reporter is like confiding in the town crier, he wound up shorn of his epaulets.

That the war Gen. McChrystal was in charge of hasn’t been going well lately wasn’t exactly calculated to mollify the president’s ire. One could argue, we suppose, that the jocular tone of the general’s subalterns in their references to the vice president and other members of Mr. Obama’s retinue was simply a case of boys being boys with aspirations of becoming wits. The quality of their remarks suggests they’re half-way there.

Continue reading The Coming Storm