Chris Dodd To Write Book About How He Saved America, With TARP

In a calculated move designed to insult America, Senator Chris Dodd has signed a book deal. His book will be out in June. Not that he's actually penning a single word of it -- it is "By Sen. Christopher J. Dodd with [random writing slave]" -- but c'mon Dodd, save the heroic legislative deal-cutting memoir for when the unemployment rate starts going down (in 400 years). Worse yet, the working title is Thirteen Days: How the Financial Crisis Changed the Politics of Washington. Fuck you, Cuban communists!

...the book will provide an intimate look at how, over the course of 13 days last September, a financial crisis led to panic and meltdown. Dodd, the chair of the Senate banking committee, will also describe how he and others acted swiftly to try to save the American economy.

The most glaring offense is the reference in the title to Bobby Kennedy's 1969 memoirThirteen Days, about the Cuban Missile Crisis. See, Bobby Kennedy was allowed to write this book because (a) it was seven years after the event and (b) after those "thirteen days," THE CRISIS WAS OVER AND NO ONE GOT NUKED. (Oh and also it was released posthumously, so it was better).

Now Dodd did work hard and showed a lot of leadership during the rushed bailout debate last fall -- he basically forced Hank Paulson to accept a bill with a number of different options he would later use, rather than just the one "buying toxic assets" option, not that it really made a difference -- and maybe some of that emergency work stopped the money markets from complete collapse. By all other standards, however, the TARP program has been the biggest failure in American legislation since... whatever piece of legislation came immediately before it. Maybe you've noticed too, but the economy is still broken.

Otherwise, we have no problems with Chris Dodd fake-writing a navel-gazing memoir about all the cool deals he made during a crisis, which hasn't even ended but is just in anothermode. If your great achievement in the past year had been to give clueless Hank Paulson $700 billion to waste on anything, wouldn't you want to gloat about it too?

 Deals [Publisher's Weekly]