This wasn’t supposed to happen until Nov. 7: It’s like the  last act of Titus Andronicus over at GM corporate headquarters.

Two weeks ago, Opel chief Karl-Friedrich  Stracke presented numbers to Dan Akerson. Akerson fires him. Opel gets two  interim chiefs in a week. Last Thursday, Opel’s new design chief Dave Lyon  doesn’t even start his job. Today, media in the U.S. and Germany report that Lyon had been escorted  from the building and to a waiting car by GM’s head of personnel. A day later,  global marketing chief Joel Ewanick suddenly leaves. Instead of wishing him all  the best for his future endeavors, GM spokesman Greg Martin puts a knife in  Ewanick’s back: “He failed to meet the expectations the company has of an  employee.”

I’m having trouble understanding all this. I’ve been told that after its  Rattnerized bailout GM is “back,” a dramatic ”success story.” The president  himself has boasted “General Motors is back on top.” Yet  now a few weeks later Bloomberg says the company is in a “slump”–it’s right there, in the headline: “slump.” How  can the bailed out, comebacked, turned around success story GM be in a  slump when the U.S. auto market as a whole is growing rapidly? It’s almost as if an easily spun media wildly underestimated the problems at  GM (and the inadequacy of the administration’s fixes) in a way that  helped President Obama’s favored narrative (and  pleased a major advertiser at the same time!) …

More.