General Motors Death Watch 168: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

87 Responses to “ General Motors Death Watch 168: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth ”

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• powerglide :
  March 21st, 2008 at 3:19 pm
  
  

  Bozoer Rebbe:

  I take your point, up to a point.

  _I’m_ certainly interested to know if the Captain is properly incentivized–I work at a GM dealer.

  But insofar as GM has an interest in boosting perception of the strength of its turnaround plans, it must make its case to the public, in many cases through journalists.

  I don’t have a high opinion of the Fourth Estate myself, indeed, like Mr. Duranty you cited above, they’re just as likely to be a fifth column.

  But journalists can and must ask questions on behalf of the public, any member of which may have a certain stake in the future of GM, if only as a car owner.

• Pch101 :
  March 21st, 2008 at 3:21 pm
  
  

  From Mark Moyer’s Triumph Forsaken

  I see. If I understand, one right-wing hawk’s opinion transcends basic facts, i.e. that US government officials didn’t know that Pham was a spy.

  Just because one guy agrees with you does not make it so. Moyar’s book is a piece of revisionist history. Given your religious faith, I would suggest that the word “revisionism” should be setting off alarm bells just about now.

• Max :
  March 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
  
  

  Bozoer:
  The Vietnam War denialism I get, but statements like “Frankly, his reliability as a journalist ranks about the same as his abilities as a driver” are just vile. Yes Halberstam was killed in a car accident. As a passenger. But I’m sure you knew that.
  Happy Purim to you too.

• frontline :
  March 21st, 2008 at 3:45 pm
  
  

  RF has put a massive amount of thought into the GM story. His analysis has really “evolved” and may come across to us as almost “abstract”.

  As far as what other questions he “should have asked” …..I think he already knew those answers,so why bother.

  When it comes to the GM story , RF is probably one step ahead of most of us..

• jurisb :
  March 21st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
  
  

  I see… your helplessness, you can meet the guru, you can have the privilege of the secret handshake, yet the caravan of apathy goes on. If those steering the mighty ships across the oceans are lost in the bank accounts that devilishly caress their basic instincts, yet nothing comes from their homo sapiens, you are destined to cease your genetics in an afterlude of a cash bleeding conflagration .

  I imagine the people of sparkling eyes, who have a vision, a dream curving beyond logics, their wives pulling out hair in hours of abscence. I see the mighty men whose eyes were not blurred by a puppy love or 40 degrees of Cranberry vodka,but by their creations of every single new curve sculpted by their artisan minds in the metal.what makes me a car lover, a die hard fanatic, a petrol head with hands permanently paint and putty licked , what makes me a man, a personality, is the same what should have made a good car to be ..a good car. unfold the wings for attitude.

  I count no hours. i shall pass for no slips in making cars. none shall pass, . what should i do to stop the extravaganza of rebadge, spendthrift of outsourcing, waste of labours under pretense of slim-sizing? I am already on my knees. do you ever see, Bob, the middle class crying families behind your parachute? The unborn children of slender paychecks and insecure future, the deserted factories of loneliness and rust. give me your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,I lift my xenon headlights behind the golden door.

• limmin :
  March 21st, 2008 at 4:46 pm
  
  

  It’s doing Farago a disservice to compare him to Halberstam. Halberstam was a prolific writer but his lengthy tomes were interminable anti-American diatribes that fly against the truth. I’ve read pretty much everything Farago has written here; he’s abrasive and opinionated (words often used to describe Rommel, Montgomery, and Churchill during WWII). But like those excellent military leaders, all he cares about is the truth and results.

  It’s curious, however, that auto journalists always single out GM for in-person maligning. Why only ambush GM execs? Bill Ford, that cosseted trust-fund baby, basically ran FoMoCo into the ground. A cabal of obscure accountants now run the show at Chrysler. Why single out GM??

  Oh, and to all you Prius-devotees: please note that the Prius is a success because Toyota DUMPED the car on our shores during its early years, selling it for less than it cost to build. (Rumor is, they’re still doing it.) That is absolutely illegal.

  Yet you bash GM for truthfully revealing that hybrid technology is cost-prohibitive. So spare me your high-mpg stories. Every gallon of gas you save was at the cost of an American worker.

  By the way, Halberstam was not driving the auto during his fatal accident. A grad student was driving and was recently prosecuted for negligence.

• Bozoer Rebbe :
  March 21st, 2008 at 5:10 pm
  
  

  # Max :
  March 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pm

  Bozoer:
  The Vietnam War denialism I get, but statements like “Frankly, his reliability as a journalist ranks about the same as his abilities as a driver” are just vile. Yes Halberstam was killed in a car accident. As a passenger. But I’m sure you knew that.
  Happy Purim to you too.
  

  What denialism? Gen Giap acknowledged in his memoirs that the North lost the Tet Offensive, that the VC were no longer an effective fighting force after ‘68, and that they only way they could win was to cultivate antiwar sentiment in the west and get the US to withdraw. Sound familiar? Had the US Senate not cravenly voted to stop all military aid to the RVN, they would have been able to hold off the North. The North’s offensive in ‘75 was not as large as the one in ‘73 that was repelled.

  I realize that the idea that the US was defeated militarily in Vietnam is an article of the faith on the left. Faith isn’t facts.

  Halberstam was a journalist, an observer, who liked standing on the sidelines offering his criticism without having to get his hands dirty. He wrote about war without ever being a soldier, he wrote about baseball without ever playing the game at a competitive level. He wrote about the car biz without ever having built or even worked on a car. That he died as a passenger, while someone else was doing the driving seems of a piece with how he acted in his career.

• Pch101 :
  March 21st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
  
  

  That he died as a passenger, while someone else was doing the driving seems of a piece with how he acted in his career.

  That is seriously reaching. You couldn’t have offered a less cogent argument.

  The lesson to be learned from Halberstam’s death is that those with histories of causing multiple vehicle accidents should probably not be used for livery work. Absolutely positively nothing to do whatsoever with Halberstam’s work, or with Boyar’s agenda of making Americans feel victorious about a conspicuous defeat.

  It’s no surprise to me that the Vietnam revisionists would also defend General Motors, yet another noteworthy example of failure that is defended by the apologists who just help to run it into the ground. The enablers aren’t going to bring GM to profitability, and unfortunately, it is the employees and the shareholders who will pay the price for this hubris and addiction to mediocrity.

• Bozoer Rebbe :
  March 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
  
  

  # Pch101 :
  March 21st, 2008 at 3:21 pm

  Just because one guy agrees with you does not make it so. Moyar’s book is a piece of revisionist history. Given your religious faith, I would suggest that the word “revisionism” should be setting off alarm bells just about now.

  Have you read the book? How do you know it’s “revisionist”? By every account the US was not defeated militarily in Vietnam. Can you name a single military engagement in Vietnam that the US lost? Tet was a disaster for the North. Yes, it came at the cost of a lot of US blood, which is how the left was able to spin it as a defeat, but the North’s losses were staggering. Yes the North briefly took Hue (murdering thousands of innocents) but they were evicted. Yes, there was a siege at the forward Marine base at Khe Sahn but every military historian considers it a tactical victory for the US. Khe Sahn was Dien Bien Phu replayed, only with a different outcome.

  It’s interesting that one comment called me a denialist and you bring up the specter of revisionism. Both of those terms are associated with those he minimize or deny the Holocaust. Am I supposed be cowed into accepting your worldview just because Jew haters use those terms?
  The rabbis of the Talmud pointed out that just because idolaters worship the sun is no reason not to enjoy sunshine. Before the neo-Nazis at the IHR tainted the word, revisionist was a perfectly acceptable term for alternate or corrective viewpoints. For example Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a man for whom I have some admiration for, founded a movement called Revisionist Zionism.

• Sajeev Mehta :
  March 21st, 2008 at 5:43 pm
  
  

  Bozoer Rebbe : Considering that Halberstam’s dissimulations on Vietnam and other subjects he covered are pretty well documented, are you sure that’s a compliment?

  I was “considering” The Reckoning and its stunning analysis of the car biz. I do my best to not consider things I was too young to know about and haven’t throughly studied. If I offended RF with my ignorance, I will apologize to him offline. (The same applies to Keller’s book on GM in the 1980s.)

  I’ll defer to the other commentators who are better equipped to debate your argument.

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