I thought that it was reasonably legible, with all letters except the o fairly obvious (the o looks a bit like an r).
That being said, an illegible and hard (for others) to reproduce signature is good for proving your identity. I disagree that an illegible signature is unethical. Now if you cannot get a point across (like a doctor’s prescription), then we have a problem, but neat or typed correspondences with an illegible signature are hardly problematic, especially if that signature is always the same.
I do have a bias with this comment as my signature is illegible but can be identified as almost totally identical on my official forms. Last election, the officials told me they appreciated my signature, since it is so distinct, unique (not following the formal cursive rules annd thus hard to replicate) and lines up with previous signatures each time.
At face value, I’d say that Bessent was unprofessional in the wording of his reply, regardless of what Senator Warren wrote. That said; without seeing the August 13th letter that Senator Warren wrote, I don’t have the full context to properly evaluate the totality of Scott Bessent’s reply.
I am in agreement with you JVB. Warren uses her Harvard pedigree to harangue others. It is her bullying tactic. Bessent was having none of it and handed her a blistering rebuke which has been sorely needed.. The time to be polite ended years ago and the Dems use every opportunity to imply that Republicans and conservatives are uneducated rubes who need to be managed by those with academic credentials. It should be noted that buying yen to boost its value helps American exporters. A devalued yen makes Japanese products extremely attractive and can create significant trade imbalances. The US consumer is the number one consumer market in terms of per capita spending which means many nations buy dollars to prop up the value of the dollar. This helps foreign producers maintain healthy trade surpluses with US. The dollars value is a function of what it can be traded for. If the BRIC countries get their way and get oil denominated in Yen then the dollar’s value will crater. Exporters will get a bit of a boost but American consumers who rely on foreign produced goods like pharmaceutical related products, and other intermediate goods we cannot produce will face huge price increases until we catch up in the manufacture of such goods.
Agreed. There is no amount of rebuke that should be withheld from Lizziepoo. She is a fraud and should called out as such at any time for any reason. Bessent’s biting rebuke was appropriate. Kudos to him.
By the way, I am not sure what the signature significance is – is it that Bessent mistreated Sen. Warren or that Sen. Warren sent him a letter filed with mediocre analysis and factual errors? I think the latter. Sen. Warren believes her own PR, much like Ocasio-Cortez but is not nearly as photogenic.
What I think Senator Warren may “deserve” is an entirely different topic, in my opinion, which could lead to the possibility of using some unethical rationalizations. I tend to separate what I think is professionalism with what I think the person may “deserve” especially when it comes to letterhead letters that represent the entity that is being written for, in this case it’s the United States of America, Department of the Treasury.
I dunno, Steve. Sending a letter on a Senate subcommittee letterhead that is both factually and legally wrong is far more egregious than the head of the targeted agency calling out the sending senator for the sending senator’s idiocy.
Remember – this wasn’s simply a senator sending a letter in her senatorial capacity to Treasury disagreeing with Administration or Treasury policy or actions. Sen. Warren is the ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, second only to Sen. Tim Scott (R – SC), and the letter is on the Committee’s letterhead. That in itself carries the supposed clout of the committee and that Sen. Warren is actually responding to Treasury with the imprimatur of the Committee.
If she is going to send something, she damn well better be accurate in her position. Otherwise, she comes off looking like the fool that she is and impugns the reputation of the Committee where she serves as the ranking member!! In my estimatiion, Bessent’s response was more measured than it could have been.
I tend to come out on your side in this, though I acknowledge that Bessent’s letter was excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke. A rebuke was warrened…oops, sorry, warranted, though, and indeed, embarrassing Warren rather than just politely explaining that she is “mistaken” is tactically defensible.
Full disclosure: I was recently censured on the ethics experts listserv for being “uncivil” when one of the “experts” lectured me with pure, emption-based BS, and I replied, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” And she didn’t.
Jack wrote, “…Bessent’s letter was excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke.”
Personally, I think being “excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke”, especially coming from the Secretary of Treasury on official letterhead, warrants calling the letter unprofessional.
I can’t even warrant tit-for-tat justification because I didn’t see any of that “excessively nasty and personal” in Senator Warrens letter. That doesn’t shield her from rebuke for being a partisan hack and ignorant of reality.
There is a place for this kind of rebuke, I just don’t think this was the the place for it. I suppose you could justifiably say that I’m holding Secretary Bessent to a higher standard because of his position representing the Federal government. It seems like professionalism is set aside and this kind of “excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke” has become far too common and normalized in today’s hyper partisan political environment.
Sen. Warren is the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Development Committee. She is not some freshman senator seeking information. She is accusing the Treasury Department (and by extension, the Trump Admin.) with taking actions that hurt US citizens in favor of a foreign nation, in this case Japan.
The tone of her letter and whether Sen. Warren was excessively nasty to Bessent are phenomenally irrelevant, even though the letter drips with condescension and arrogance. Yet, she was flat out wrong on the facts and the law all the while using the Committee letterhead, giving the impression that the Committee had the same concerns. As ranking member of the Committee, she doesn’t get to do that. Bessent’s blistering response was warranted and, frankly, did not go far enough in setting the record straight.
In law school, when she taught at University of Houston Law Center and/or University of Texas School of Law, she would have lambasted a student for that kind of sloppy workproduct.
johnburger2013 wrote, “I think you are missing the point.”
No, I honestly don’t think I’ve missed any of the points made by anyone in this sub thread, but I do think others have missed my point. I simply disagree that any of the points made by others in this sub thread removes the individual responsibility of Bessent to conduct himself in a professional manner when conducting official Department of the Treasury business, and that letter was official Department of the Treasury business.
Let me be perfectly clear to everyone, I think Senator Warren is an ignorant political hack, but that doesn’t mean for one second that I will openly condone someone like Bessent acting in an unprofessional manner, as I firmly believe he did, regardless of who he wrote the letter to. The fact that the letter was written to Warren, who I thoroughly dislike and I think deserved a stern rebuke, doesn’t change the fact that Bessent was unprofessional in my opinion. I’m making a conscious choice not to engage in Sicilian Ethics.
That’s my last words on this.
You all are welcome to your opinions on this and you’re free to have your last words too.
This is also an example of the head of an organization setting the tone, no? Can you imagine how the President of the United States would have started the letter?
Jack asked, “This is also an example of the head of an organization setting the tone, no?”
Yup.
Jack asked, “Can you imagine how the President of the United States would have started the letter?”
With Trump’s unethical loose cannon mouth, that “head of the organization” would start it off by calling her Pocahontas, and a few other choice words of course.
Trump has set the rhetorical barre pretty low and it appears that Bessent is following suit.
My entire life Republicans and conservatives have been taking the high road, being polite when others are not and refraining from personal ridicule. These days we are getting shellacked, and it is time to let loose the metaphorical dogs of war.
Loved the letter. Wouldn’t mind seeing more of this.
Sec. Bessent is not just responding to a letter from the minority leader of a committee. He is sending a multi-point message, and it’s pretty much the same message he (and other cabinet Secretaries) have been sending for the last two years.
I will not suffer fools.
I will not suffer fools who try to nail me to the wall with erroneous “facts”, incomplete data, and/or outright lies.
The rebuke for engaging in #2 will be swift, sharp, and complete.
Steve W is absolutely correct that this mentality is more unprofessional than other options. But in some sense, as I think about The Golden Rule (“treat others as you would like to be treated”), Bessent’s response is spot on.
Why?
Because individuals like Warren have, for years, been treating those in the opposing party horribly, so…the Golden Rule leads me to believe that Sen. Warren wants to be treated exactly the way she treats others.
I do not believe being polite is situations like this is necessarily ethical. There are a lot of people who can’t read between the lines. You have to beat people over the head with a point to get it to sink in. This week, I told a bunch of students that if they catch on fire, they need to stop, drop, roll…and yell “I’m on fire!”. You have to yell “I’m on fire” because you don’t want to burn for an extra 5-6 seconds while people figure out why you are rolling around on the ground. Bessent was making sure anyone reading the letter understood how wrong Sen. Warren was and that her letter was not to be trusted. Making it polite would result in most people missing that point.
My father used to say that you can’t soften bad news by first giving good news. He said that when managers would try to ease into criticism by telling an employee what they were doing right before getting to the stuff they were doing wrong, it did not good. The employees generally ignored anything after the “…but…”. You just have to go straight to the criticism if you really want them to hear it.
I personally believe that Bessent was too kind to her. He treated her like a fool who doesn’t understand anything that goes on in her committee. It is much more likely that she understands that the things she wrote were intentional lies designed to malign Sec. Bessent and Pres. Trump. She set out to manufacture lies to mislead the American people, and that is much worse than anything Bessent wrote about her. She is not THAT stupid and she has staffers who understand these things and could explain them to her. Manufacturing lies to intentionally malign and sow distrust of the US government is not anything that should be tolerated in a Senator.
Seriously though, that first name signature does not look like Scott. It’s unethical to have illegible handwriting.
I thought that it was reasonably legible, with all letters except the o fairly obvious (the o looks a bit like an r).
That being said, an illegible and hard (for others) to reproduce signature is good for proving your identity. I disagree that an illegible signature is unethical. Now if you cannot get a point across (like a doctor’s prescription), then we have a problem, but neat or typed correspondences with an illegible signature are hardly problematic, especially if that signature is always the same.
I do have a bias with this comment as my signature is illegible but can be identified as almost totally identical on my official forms. Last election, the officials told me they appreciated my signature, since it is so distinct, unique (not following the formal cursive rules annd thus hard to replicate) and lines up with previous signatures each time.
His signature says Aima.
But my comment was snark anyway of the “miss the elephant in the room” variety.
Pot and kettle of unethical actors.
Poking Senator Warren in the eye with insult and dismissiveness is unethical.
Pointing out she is a soulless demagogue is priceless. Though I’m sure she’ll get over it in some very fake native way.
Wow, that’s a rather scathing letter.
At face value, I’d say that Bessent was unprofessional in the wording of his reply, regardless of what Senator Warren wrote. That said; without seeing the August 13th letter that Senator Warren wrote, I don’t have the full context to properly evaluate the totality of Scott Bessent’s reply.
Why is Bessent’s response to her unprofessional? Here is Warren’s letter:
https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_bessent_on_yen_intervention.pdf.
I tend to agree with Bessent – Lizziepoo is out of her league and needs a bit of schooling. She has a nice signature, though.
jvb
I am in agreement with you JVB. Warren uses her Harvard pedigree to harangue others. It is her bullying tactic. Bessent was having none of it and handed her a blistering rebuke which has been sorely needed.. The time to be polite ended years ago and the Dems use every opportunity to imply that Republicans and conservatives are uneducated rubes who need to be managed by those with academic credentials. It should be noted that buying yen to boost its value helps American exporters. A devalued yen makes Japanese products extremely attractive and can create significant trade imbalances. The US consumer is the number one consumer market in terms of per capita spending which means many nations buy dollars to prop up the value of the dollar. This helps foreign producers maintain healthy trade surpluses with US.
The dollars value is a function of what it can be traded for. If the BRIC countries get their way and get oil denominated in Yen then the dollar’s value will crater. Exporters will get a bit of a boost but American consumers who rely on foreign produced goods like pharmaceutical related products, and other intermediate goods we cannot produce will face huge price increases until we catch up in the manufacture of such goods.
Agreed. There is no amount of rebuke that should be withheld from Lizziepoo. She is a fraud and should called out as such at any time for any reason. Bessent’s biting rebuke was appropriate. Kudos to him.
By the way, I am not sure what the signature significance is – is it that Bessent mistreated Sen. Warren or that Sen. Warren sent him a letter filed with mediocre analysis and factual errors? I think the latter. Sen. Warren believes her own PR, much like Ocasio-Cortez but is not nearly as photogenic.
jvb
What I think Senator Warren may “deserve” is an entirely different topic, in my opinion, which could lead to the possibility of using some unethical rationalizations. I tend to separate what I think is professionalism with what I think the person may “deserve” especially when it comes to letterhead letters that represent the entity that is being written for, in this case it’s the United States of America, Department of the Treasury.
I dunno, Steve. Sending a letter on a Senate subcommittee letterhead that is both factually and legally wrong is far more egregious than the head of the targeted agency calling out the sending senator for the sending senator’s idiocy.
Remember – this wasn’s simply a senator sending a letter in her senatorial capacity to Treasury disagreeing with Administration or Treasury policy or actions. Sen. Warren is the ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, second only to Sen. Tim Scott (R – SC), and the letter is on the Committee’s letterhead. That in itself carries the supposed clout of the committee and that Sen. Warren is actually responding to Treasury with the imprimatur of the Committee.
If she is going to send something, she damn well better be accurate in her position. Otherwise, she comes off looking like the fool that she is and impugns the reputation of the Committee where she serves as the ranking member!! In my estimatiion, Bessent’s response was more measured than it could have been.
jvb
I tend to come out on your side in this, though I acknowledge that Bessent’s letter was excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke. A rebuke was warrened…oops, sorry, warranted, though, and indeed, embarrassing Warren rather than just politely explaining that she is “mistaken” is tactically defensible.
Full disclosure: I was recently censured on the ethics experts listserv for being “uncivil” when one of the “experts” lectured me with pure, emption-based BS, and I replied, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” And she didn’t.
Jack wrote, “…Bessent’s letter was excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke.”
Personally, I think being “excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke”, especially coming from the Secretary of Treasury on official letterhead, warrants calling the letter unprofessional.
I can’t even warrant tit-for-tat justification because I didn’t see any of that “excessively nasty and personal” in Senator Warrens letter. That doesn’t shield her from rebuke for being a partisan hack and ignorant of reality.
There is a place for this kind of rebuke, I just don’t think this was the the place for it. I suppose you could justifiably say that I’m holding Secretary Bessent to a higher standard because of his position representing the Federal government. It seems like professionalism is set aside and this kind of “excessively nasty and personal in its rebuke” has become far too common and normalized in today’s hyper partisan political environment.
I think you are missing the point.
Sen. Warren is the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Development Committee. She is not some freshman senator seeking information. She is accusing the Treasury Department (and by extension, the Trump Admin.) with taking actions that hurt US citizens in favor of a foreign nation, in this case Japan.
The tone of her letter and whether Sen. Warren was excessively nasty to Bessent are phenomenally irrelevant, even though the letter drips with condescension and arrogance. Yet, she was flat out wrong on the facts and the law all the while using the Committee letterhead, giving the impression that the Committee had the same concerns. As ranking member of the Committee, she doesn’t get to do that. Bessent’s blistering response was warranted and, frankly, did not go far enough in setting the record straight.
In law school, when she taught at University of Houston Law Center and/or University of Texas School of Law, she would have lambasted a student for that kind of sloppy workproduct.
jvb
johnburger2013 wrote, “I think you are missing the point.”
No, I honestly don’t think I’ve missed any of the points made by anyone in this sub thread, but I do think others have missed my point. I simply disagree that any of the points made by others in this sub thread removes the individual responsibility of Bessent to conduct himself in a professional manner when conducting official Department of the Treasury business, and that letter was official Department of the Treasury business.
Let me be perfectly clear to everyone, I think Senator Warren is an ignorant political hack, but that doesn’t mean for one second that I will openly condone someone like Bessent acting in an unprofessional manner, as I firmly believe he did, regardless of who he wrote the letter to. The fact that the letter was written to Warren, who I thoroughly dislike and I think deserved a stern rebuke, doesn’t change the fact that Bessent was unprofessional in my opinion. I’m making a conscious choice not to engage in Sicilian Ethics.
That’s my last words on this.
You all are welcome to your opinions on this and you’re free to have your last words too.
This is also an example of the head of an organization setting the tone, no? Can you imagine how the President of the United States would have started the letter?
Jack asked, “This is also an example of the head of an organization setting the tone, no?”
Yup.
Jack asked, “Can you imagine how the President of the United States would have started the letter?”
With Trump’s unethical loose cannon mouth, that “head of the organization” would start it off by calling her Pocahontas, and a few other choice words of course.
Trump has set the rhetorical barre pretty low and it appears that Bessent is following suit.
My entire life Republicans and conservatives have been taking the high road, being polite when others are not and refraining from personal ridicule. These days we are getting shellacked, and it is time to let loose the metaphorical dogs of war.
Loved the letter. Wouldn’t mind seeing more of this.
“Loved the letter. Wouldn’t mind seeing more of this.”
Heh! Neither would I!
PWS
Sec. Bessent is not just responding to a letter from the minority leader of a committee. He is sending a multi-point message, and it’s pretty much the same message he (and other cabinet Secretaries) have been sending for the last two years.
Steve W is absolutely correct that this mentality is more unprofessional than other options. But in some sense, as I think about The Golden Rule (“treat others as you would like to be treated”), Bessent’s response is spot on.
Why?
Because individuals like Warren have, for years, been treating those in the opposing party horribly, so…the Golden Rule leads me to believe that Sen. Warren wants to be treated exactly the way she treats others.
Sec. Bessent merely obliged her.
I do not believe being polite is situations like this is necessarily ethical. There are a lot of people who can’t read between the lines. You have to beat people over the head with a point to get it to sink in. This week, I told a bunch of students that if they catch on fire, they need to stop, drop, roll…and yell “I’m on fire!”. You have to yell “I’m on fire” because you don’t want to burn for an extra 5-6 seconds while people figure out why you are rolling around on the ground. Bessent was making sure anyone reading the letter understood how wrong Sen. Warren was and that her letter was not to be trusted. Making it polite would result in most people missing that point.
My father used to say that you can’t soften bad news by first giving good news. He said that when managers would try to ease into criticism by telling an employee what they were doing right before getting to the stuff they were doing wrong, it did not good. The employees generally ignored anything after the “…but…”. You just have to go straight to the criticism if you really want them to hear it.
I personally believe that Bessent was too kind to her. He treated her like a fool who doesn’t understand anything that goes on in her committee. It is much more likely that she understands that the things she wrote were intentional lies designed to malign Sec. Bessent and Pres. Trump. She set out to manufacture lies to mislead the American people, and that is much worse than anything Bessent wrote about her. She is not THAT stupid and she has staffers who understand these things and could explain them to her. Manufacturing lies to intentionally malign and sow distrust of the US government is not anything that should be tolerated in a Senator.