'Anarchic' Conan Perfect for Treasury Secretary

The idiot circus that is NBC’s late-night merry-go-round resembles nothing so much as the US financial crisis, so what better next stop for Conan O’Brien than the Treasury? That’s what Leslie Savan would like to see, given that Secretary Tim Geithner completely lacks the O’Brien-like “cojones to be admirably, even hilariously, petty about it in public.”

The recession and the NBC saga share the thread “high-handed corporate incompetence in which all nasty consequences are relentlessly shifted onto workers below the perpetrator in the pecking order,” Savan writes for the Nation, with NBC exec Jeff Zucker playing Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and other CEOs “who will not make tough decisions and instead ties everyone around him into contractual knots while hoping it will all work out in the end.” The move would help President Obama “recoup his populist mojo,” Savan concludes, since “Conan clearly has a grasp of exactly what you should do when, after years of grueling effort, the Man jerks your chain just as you’re on the brink of realizing a long-cherished goal.”
(More Conan O'Brien stories.)