I’m hearing an idea that the departure of White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, announced a couple of hours ago, had something to do with a recent Washington, D.C. screening of Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job (Sony Classic, 10.8). I don’t even know for sure if there was a recent D.C. screening. The Sony Classics guys aren’t picking up.

Inside Job charts all the Wall Street gambling and thievery that went on for years starting with the Reagan administration and particularly during the eight years of Dubya, and then makes a persuasive case that Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other Obama administration bigwigs who strongly supported and heavily profited from the Wild West derivative speculations that primarily caused the 2008 crash can hardly be trusted to accurately diagnose, much less correct, the nation’s financial troubles.

It sounds like a bit of a reach, but I love the idea that Inside Job might have been at least a partial factor in Summer’s departure, which of course is a very good thing. I’m supposing that there might have been a concern that anti-Obama candidates would latch onto the film’s assertions as a way to beat up Summers and thereby underline the claim that Wall Street bad guys are shaping and organizing the Obama administration’s financial policy. In any event: Ding Dong, the Warlock Is Dead.