Someone is going to tell me that this should be in an open thread, no doubt, but, well, let's see where it goes....
It seems that our George is remodeling the "Situation Room" at the White House. Apparently this has been done quite a numuber of times since JFK first built it; it would be interesting to know at what junctures the remodels took place, for reasons to be divulged after the fold...
An aside first. I'm a recovering executive, sort of midlevel as a rule, never the honcho and, recently, a consultant instead: I'm kind of a grumpy fella, and live by the rule once expounded in the Economist, that only the clinically depressed are capable of rational cognition. The upshot of this is that I tend to view corporate machinations with some jaundice, if not precisely a Chicken Little attitude; I'm not sure whether that's what irritates the powers that be, or that I am more frequently than not absolutely correct in my Cassandra imitations. A second upshot, for what it's worth is that Big Pharma gets a certain amount of my money for happy pills; I find that it doesn't dull my perceptions particularly, but my wife tells me that I'm a good bit easier to live with (the bosses beg to differ).
What this has to do with anything is the following: I noticed some years ago that there is a strong inverse correlation between businesses' expenditures on office furniture and remodeling and their economic/business prospects, i.e. the incidence of major remodels coincides on a regular basis with diminished or diminishing business success. A corollary of this rule might be the well-documented correlation between the naming of stadiums and the like after corporations and the subsequent cooling of the given corporation's success at its core activity. My suggestion is that the basis for said cooling precedes the remodeling/naming, and that the honchos in question, having come to the tragic recognition that they don't know whether to shit or go blind, embark on showy, hubristic activities as a defense mechanism.
George, our MBA president (as the not-so-proud holder of a fairly fancy one, I KNEW this was a bad idea) appears to be engaged in both activities: first we have the hooha about the pResidential Library cum Eighth Wonder of the World, and now he's getting in the interior decorators. Methinks he's finally "got it", knows deep down that he hasn't the remotest clue how to climb out of the hole he's dug. The saddest part is that honchos who thus indulge themselves all too frequently run their corporate charges right into the ground. He's already wrecked the Republican Party; let's hope the nation itself is made of more durable stuff.