Bailout Watch 260: Warren Brown Is Insane

Warren Brown is a shameless Detroit cheerleader. The Washington Post’s carmudgeon’s inability to criticize Motown’s products, process or prognosis has provided TTAC grill mist for years. Recently, we chronicled WaPo Warren’s lame, lamentable attempt to play the race card on The Big 2.8’s behalf. “ Reluctance to Help Detroit Reeks of Class Bias” takes a different– though equally fabulous– tack. Brown starts by suggesting that anti-bailout journalists are effete intellectual snobs. “The queries [against the bailout] often come from people who earn substantially more than the estimated $71,000 annually in wages and benefits paid to UAW members. They come from people who, having reached upper-middle-class status by virtue of their college educations and communication skills, certainly wouldn’t settle for earning less.” Does Warren know that the UAW has a freelance writers’ branch? Anyway, the main event: “There is a feeling in this country– apparent in the often condescending, dismissive way Detroit’s automobile companies have been treated on Capitol Hill– that people who work with their hands and the companies that employ them are inferior to those who work with their minds and plow profit from information. How else to explain the clearly disparate treatment given to companies such as Citigroup and General Motors?” How else indeed. More WTF after the jump.

“It apparently matters not that the domestic car manufacturers account for 3 million to 5 million U.S. jobs. It matters not that, despite some bad guesses on product development, they’ve remained engines of U.S. innovation. (Their work with biologically derived fuels and emergency communications systems are examples.) Nor does it matter that they pulled us through several wars and one terrorist attack (GM’s zero-percent financing plan after the Sept. 11, 2001, horror).”

Bad guesses? Engines of innovation? Kudos for spending $100 per vehicle to line the fuel system to burn a fuel that’s a bigger boondoggle than the bailout, that earns them spurious federal fuel economy regulation credits (not to mention spending a still-unspecified amount to buy into a bio-fuel company even as the house burned down around them)? Emergency communications systems? GM zero percent financing pulled us a terrorist attack? Bad juju here folks, and lots of it. Now with extra xenophobia, self-hatred and sarcasm.

What the heck? If things get really rough, we can always catch a sale at Wal-Mart. Citigroup most certainly would be willing to finance our purchases at favorable interest rates. What a country! We once rejoiced in building things, innovating, racing to the top. Now, at least for the people who use their hands to make this country go, we’re celebrating a mad dash to the bottom.

Are we not better than this? Is this the America we want to be?

Is that a trick question or is that a trick question?