Secretary Janosz

Doesn't this guy ...

I watched the Newshour with Jim Lehrer earlier tonight, the first half hour of which was devoted to a lengthy interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. It followed the same frustrating progression as most of the program's newsmaker interviews with Obama administration officials, which consists of Jim Lehrer asking relevant, thoughtful questions and the interview subjects evading them. This isn't much different from TV news interviews on other channels, except that the Newshour lets these segments run for almost 30 minutes. By the time it's over, I usually feel like I know less about the subject than I did before watching the interview, because the esteemed interviewee spoke at such length and I couldn't figure out a word of it.

Tonight was more of the same. While the treasury secretary never wavered from the administration's pre-ordained script, my mind wandered off in search of more nourishing thoughts. I'm pretty sure that what I came up with doesn't qualify, but it was more captivating than Geithner's talking points. 

... look like this guy?

So here's my eureka moment: doesn't Geithner look an awful lot like Peter MacNicol, the character actor who played a member of President Wayne Palmer's cabinet in season six of 24? I'm not sure this bodes well for Obama, since MacNicol's presidential advsier betrayed the POTUS. To make things even worse, earlier in his career, MacNicol played Janosz, the effeminate museum employee in Ghostbusters II who becomes Vigo the Carpathian's henchman. Anyone who reads the news probably suspects that Geithner is already beholden to his Wall Street peeps, but he looks so much like Janosz, I can't help thinking he answers to another, even more sinister, dark master. And if Secretary Janosz is half as bad as his fictional lookalikes, then we better hope Obama can rely on a CIA operative who resembles Kiefer Sutherland and a kick-ass Bobby Brown song about Ghostbusting to bail him out of whatever trouble Janosz and Vigo are plotting.