While I agree with Dan that it’s been no fun watching my investments tank, it has become obvious that the collective wisdom of Wall St. is both limited and based on a set of values that I don’t share.

I don’t watch much any cable news these days, yet I can guess that some number of talking heads are nattering on about how “the market” is passing judgment on Obama’s plans, and finding them wanting.

What I want to know is: why we should care? Of course I don’t like seeing my last ten years of savings getting hammered; I’d be rather pleased, in fact, if the stock market rallied for a very long time. But shouldn’t it be pretty obvious by now that the collective judgment of “the market” isn’t worth sh*t?

I’m hopeful that the new administration will be different, but at the same time, if passing the buck and covering your ass has become institutionalized in DC, it’s going to take more than a few Gene Kranz’s to change the tone.

I was thinking about two former American government employees this weekend, and how the differences between them tell us a lot about why the United States is in so much trouble today.

The first person is Eugene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director immortalized in the film Apollo 13. I watched a rerun of the film on Friday night, and was struck again by his remarkable leadership of the team that improvised the astronauts’ rescue after an in-flight explosion crippled their spacecraft and placed their lives in peril. Many readers probably remember the moment in the film when Kranz tells his colleagues: “Failure is not an option.” This line may have been apocryphal, but when I survey the landscape of problems we face at home and abroad, I wish we had more people like Kranz in key leadership positions.

[…]

Now compare that frank and honest statement with the behavior of another former government employee: Richard Perle. In a recent article in The National Interest and a public appearance at the Nixon Center, Perle has tried to sell the story that neither he nor his fellow neoconservatives had any significant influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration, and especially the decision to invade Iraq. Specifically, he denounces the supposedly “false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative ‘ideologues.’” He suggests that no one has ever documented this claim, either conveniently ignoring the many books and articles that did exactly that, or misrepresenting what these works actually say.

At Palestine Square, opposite a mosque called Al-Aqsa, is a synagogue where Jews of this ancient city gather at dawn. Over the entrance is a banner saying: “Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution from the Jewish community of Esfahan.”

[…]I inquired how he felt about the chants of “Death to Israel” — “Marg bar Esraeel” — that punctuate life in Iran.

“Let them say ‘Death to Israel,’ ” he said. “I’ve been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I’ve visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.”