He's Not An Employee, Just A Fanboy

Poor Tim Giethner. For some reason, everyone thinks he worked for Goldman Sachs:

Timothy F. Geithner has been misidentified as a former Wall Street insider from Goldman Sachs so many times since he became the Treasury secretary that he and his advisers had taken to joking about it. Then the joke backfired.

Earlier this month, Mr. Geithner had breakfast in Manhattan with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Robert Steel, a deputy mayor and former Treasury official in the Bush administration who had previously worked at Goldman. Facetiously, a Geithner aide said Mr. Steel and Mr. Geithner knew each other from the investment bank, The New York Times’s Jackie Calmes reports.

Later that day at a public event, the mayor in all seriousness referred to Mr. Steel and Mr. Geithner, and added, “They both worked at Goldman.”

Oops.

Just as the Geithner aide’s humor fell flat, likewise newspaper corrections, Mr. Geithner’s objections to TV news interviewers and his staff’s work to spread the boss’s résumé have failed to dispel the belief that Mr. Geithner is a former Wall Street banker, or more specifically, a Goldman guy.

Yeah, total mystery, why could anyone think this stuff:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has met more often with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein than Congressional leaders, including the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader, according to his official calendar.

Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has shown up on Geithner's calendar at least 38 times through March 2010 since the Treasury Secretary took office in January 2009, three more entries than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 13 more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly four times as many as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner combined, according to a copy of Geithner's daily log recently published online by the Treasury Department. The imbalance is striking, considering that Geithner was heavily involved in financial regulatory reform legislation, which Congress was grappling with during the period covered by the calendar.

Or you know, stuff like this:

Beyond his tax gaffe, which will mainly serve to politically weaken Obama's pick, Whalen says Geithner is the wrong many for the job because of his decision-making as President of the New York Fed.

"I believe Tim Geithner only represents part of Wall Street - Goldman Sachs," he says, suggesting Goldman was the "primary beneficiary of the AIG bailout" and notes Goldman alum Stephen Friedman serves on the board of the NY Fed. (Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, with whom Geithner had frequent meetings in the past year, are also Goldman alum.)

No, Tim Giethner never worked for Goldman Sachs. He's just always been their fanboy, and he loves hanging out with their shady as fuck Chairman.

Is that better or worse?