Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Unsung American Hero

As the nation takes pride in Capt. Richard Phillips, who offered himself up to save his crew in the Indian Ocean, and Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the last to leave his ditched airliner in a Manhattan River, add another name to the list of American leaders under pressure.

Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican who holds John Edwards' North Carolina seat, has told an audience how he responded to the financial crisis last fall.

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take,'" Burr said, according to the Hendersonville Times-News. "'And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

Sen. Burr now predicts the economy will recover but very slowly and not in the economists' classic V or W graph. "I think we are in a Nike swoosh,” he told constituents.

Burr claims to be a 12th cousin of Thomas Jefferson's Vice-President Aaron Burr, who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel after Hamilton called his conduct "despicable," but they didn't have ATM machines or running shoes in those days.

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