Reply #88: Taibbi: Bob Rubin Cuddles

[DemReadingDU]

First you need to read
Bob Rubin Just Wants to be Cuddled by Iris Mack

So that’s what this is about. For a moment I was totally speechless and had to dig into my Harvard trained PhD brain to figure out what the hell he meant by “cuddling”! What can I say; once a teetotaling math geek, always a bit slow to pick up on signals from the menfolk. So the former Treasury Secretary had a “crush” on me! And not long afterward the former Treasury Secretary had his tongue down my throat and hands everywhere sort of like an octopus. But as soon as the thought entered my mind — the former Treasury Secretary has his tongue down my throat?! — I came to my senses a bit and awkwardly went back home before we both got too carried away. This is to say, I said to myself that there would be no other former Treasury Secretary appendages entering any other of my orifices.
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Things were much more relaxed by the time I walked him back to the Ritz – which was along the way to my South Beach condo. When we passed a homeless man along the way he made a bit of a show of opening up his fat leather billfold and producing a dollar — “There but for the grace of God…” he remarked melodramatically — and I gave him a lot of heat for that, because who exactly did he think he was kidding? I said give the man a job. Heck, you’re the head of a bank!

more...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iris-mack/bob-rubin-just-wants-to-b_b_557621.html


Taibbi responds...


5/1/10 Bob Rubin Cuddles
Matt Taibbi

No man’s behavior looks attractive when he’s cheating on his wife, but this little tell-all by a woman who had a sort-of fling with former Goldman chief and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin is more than unusually embarrassing. It’s all coming out now — Goldman is officially the new Tiger Woods. The next revelation has to be something involving Gary Cohn and Ted Haggard.
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A multi-multi-millionaire giving a homeless guy a dollar on the way to the Ritz… if that isn’t the perfect metaphor for the modern “Third Way” Democratic Party, I don’t know what is. And Jesus, is there any area of human interaction where these guys aren’t complete and utter culturally tone-deaf buffoons? Even during the hearings, every last one of these Goldman guys, it was like they had no idea how awful they sounded, and how much the whole world wanted to reach through the TV and pull their tongues out every time they opened their mouths. It’s amazing.

An even creepier side note about that above passage: what if it’s true? What if a Bob Rubin really does, a hundred million dollars later, still retain some ingrained fear of being broke and forced to live on the street? That would really be telling, and go pretty far toward explaining the pathology, I think. Or maybe not. But it’s interesting.

more...
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/05/01/bob-rubin-cuddles/