What is it about Tim Geithner that makes everybody grab for copies of the founding documents? Is it his puckish eyebrows? His haircuts from Felix? His cozy camaraderie with Citigroup? Who the hell knows?

At any rate, this is the wrong way to wave the Constitution at Tim. If you recall.

And this is the right way…

It was the late 1990s, Lawrence Summers was Treasury secretary, and Geithner, as the undersecretary for international affairs, was his loyal deputy. Summers gave a speech on Japan’s troubled banking system, a subject that Seidman, who then worked for Morgan Stanley, knew intimately from his frequent visits to the country. “It was essentially not relevant,” [Bill] Seidman says of Summers’ speech. It showed “a lack of familiarity with what’s going on there.” Seidman, never a shrinking violet, said as much at the time when a reporter asked him in Japan for a comment—at which point he ran afoul of Geithner. According to Seidman, Geithner called him and said, “You’re a disloyal American. You can’t make statements like that on foreign soil about a secretary of the Treasury.”

Seidman, who was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, wasn’t accustomed to having his loyalty questioned, certainly not by someone approximately 40 years his junior. “I said, ‘Where does it say that in the Constitution?’ ” Seidman tells me.

It must be the puckish eyebrows.