Bloodthirsty Liberal

The Brits are still trying to figure out how to get the US-formatted DVDs of My Name is Earl that Obama gave them to play in their machines. So they called the toll-free number of the White House for a little technical help.

They might as well have dialed Bangalore directly. Straight to voicemail:

Sir Gus O’Donnell, Britain’s most senior civil servant, exposed transatlantic tension when he protested that Downing Street was finding it “unbelievably difficult” to plan for next month’s G20 summit in London because of problems tracking down senior figures in the US administration. “There is nobody there. You cannot believe how difficult it is,” the Cabinet Secretary told a civil service conference in Gateshead.

…

“You get to a certain point, and you can’t go any further,” Sir Gus said. “A whole new bunch of people come in who probably haven’t been in government before.” Fifty days after President Obama was sworn in, every senior post in the US Treasury Department remains vacant, with the exception of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, who should have 17 deputies. The vacuum has prompted complaints that it is struggling to deal with the most severe downturn since the 1930s.

What’s the right analogy? Geithner as Twilight Zone character, searching in vain for someone, anyone, to explain how he got there? Or Geithner as Gloria Swanson, wandering the echoing, marbled halls of Treasury in a silk robe—drapes drawn tight—muttering to himself, “Ready when you are, BH”?

It would appear that when Gordon Brown got Obama’s cell phone number last week, he got the chump line, not the inside line.

As reader Joe predicted, there will be a time when what goes around comes around. I so want to be there when it happens.

UPDATED
Ed Morrissey:

Administrations change in Washington every four or eight years, but the bureaucracy is supposed to provide for competent continuity — in fact, it’s the only good reason for it to exist. In my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve seen a transition this disorganized, this incompetent, and this embarrassing.