26 November 2008

This isn't news

A Bloomberg story posted yesterday opened with the following paragraph:

The deal to rescue the world's best-known bank was pieced together by regulators over Domino's pizza in near-empty offices one block from the White House.

Well, of course it was fueled by pizza, and pieced together by regulators working late. That's how nearly everything in this town happens.

There was a rumour (possibly an urban legend) that the pizza delivery guys knew the Iraq war was coming before anyone else did, because they were delivering to the Pentagon.

The Bloomberg story does make one wonder if the writer(s) behind the piece read the recent reprint of Marjorie Williams' primer on Washington life in Slate which includes the following paragraph:

The fables of power in Washington are, of course, 95 percent hooey; the truth is far more prosaic. Policy is made by a thousand tiny engines. A Cabinet secretary has social firepower, but it's the analysts who report to the deputy assistant secretaries who are really writing the rules, along with certain staff members on certain Senate and House subcommittees—the men and women who live for the day the Washington Post will describe them as "key staffers." And they aren't out at Hollywood's idea of a Glittering Washington Party; they're back at their scrungy government-issue desks, scarfing down a Domino's pizza over another late-night assignment. Under either party, late-night revelry is unknown to "official" Washington. It's been suggested that one reason sex scandals have such an explosive impact on Washington is that there is so little sex going on here in the first place.

And for what it's worth, not all late-night regulatory or policy crafting sessions are fueled by Domino's. The machine in which I am a cog is located not terribly far from the orignal Ledo restaurant and we often dispatch someone to collect our fuel there.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...