This morning, GM handed over its bankruptcy filing to a clerk at the federal court in lower Manhattan. The Times called the event anticlimactic, by which they either mean because it’s been an awfully long time coming or they were disappointed that Rick Wagoner didn’t materialize in the courtroom, yell “I object!” and then throw his body against a soon-to-be-discontinued Saturn. (We know we are.) But P.J. O’Rourke, writing in the Journal, had the opposite reaction to the humbling of the onetime icon of American business: “The phrase ‘bankrupt General Motors’ … leaves Americans my age in economic shock,” he wrote in the Journal yesterday. “The words are as melodramatic as ‘Mom’s nude photos.’” Obama is expected to address the fallout and expound on the greater meaning of the bankruptcy later today.
G.M. Seeks Bankruptcy and a New Start [NYT]
The End of the Affair [WSJ]
