I was motoring out Route 270 to Northern Maryland farm country to visit my in-laws on a beautiful Saturday morning when the traffic inexplicably congealed about 10 miles outside of Frederick. We crawled on at the pace of a Galapagos Tortoise for about 45 minutes before finally coming upon the source of the bottleneck. There, atop an overpass, was a family of five, who had draped a number of banners over the side:
REMOVE OBAMA FROM OFFICE!!!!
HONK IF YOU LOVE LIBERTY!!!!
OBAMA IS DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!!!
These appeals coincided with a significant plunge in the stock market, attributed not to the destruction of our country by our reigning President, but to the fact that economy is improving, and unemployment dropping, faster than any economists predicted. An improving economy terrifies Wall Street traders because it can mean that the Fed will stop Quantative Easing (buying up bonds to flood the economy with money) which has propped up prices of stocks and about everything else. It apparently terrified the people on the bridge as well.
I’ve been home for a long time. Friday night, I depart for Pakistan and the Congo. It will be good to get back in touch with my colleagues, and with our clients. This morning I was interviewed by a woman in Egypt. I asked her how she was weathering the current situation. “We are used to it,” she said.
It wasn’t so much what she said, as how she said it.
Rupert