Little Lord Pontchartrain
mikethemadbiologist | October 9, 2007What's one more criminal in the mix, anyway? So what if a government contractor supplied weapons to Liberia's Charles Taylor and the Taliban (italics mine):
Viktor Bout, was paid tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars while illegally flying transport missions for the United States in Iraq. Bout is the notorious Russian weapons merchant whose fleet of aging Soviet aircraft rivals that of some NATO countries in its size and capacity. By marrying his access to Soviet bloc weapons with his airlift capacity, Bout established himself as the world's premiere purveyor of illicit weapons to the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 10, 2007This quote from Fred Kaplan's Slate article has left me gobsmacked:
At the same time, nearly all politicians, including most Democrats, have come out against a total withdrawal and have recognized that we will have some military presence in Iraq for a long time to come.
Hold that thought, because I want to remind you of some polling data I discussed a couple of weeks ago:
From Strategic Vision, a Republican polling firm:
4. Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only)
Yes 51%
No 39%
Undecided 10%
Not beginning a withdrawal…
mikethemadbiologist | August 28, 2007...and why most scientists oppose the Bush administration. In a post about hurricane Katrina, Rick Perlstein writes (bold original, italics mine):
I recently had an instructive moment with a colleague here at Campaign for America's Future. We've been discussing a series of texts for a redesign of the site meant to introduce the various themes of The Big Con. In one box, he'd placed various consequences of conservative government. In another, he'd placed descriptions various fundamentals of conservative philosophy. He'd placed "cronyism" in the first box. I gently corrected him, moving it to…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2007Yes, I've cribbed the title from Chris Hedges' superb, must-read book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. But Josh Marshall stumbles across a great insight about the Iraq War and Occupation, but doesn't quite carry through all the way. So the Mad Biologist will. Marshall writes about President Bush (italics mine):
And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.
By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2007By way of archcrone (via skippy), I came across this McClatchy article which discusses the massive inflation in food prices:
The Labor Department's most recent inflation data showed that U.S. food prices rose by 4.1 percent for the 12 months ending in June, but a deeper look at the numbers reveals that the price of milk, eggs and other essentials in the American diet are actually rising by double digits.
Already stung by a two-year rise in gasoline prices, American consumers now face sharply higher prices for foods they can't do without. This little-known fact may go a long way to explaining…
mikethemadbiologist | August 10, 2007Because they don't know the rules. I was stunned to read about this admission by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman (italics mine):
Towards the end of the meeting, Dorothy Reik, President of Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains, urged Waxman to use the "inherent contempt" power of Congress to bring criminal charges against Bush and Cheney and their aides, hold a hearing in Congress on those charges, and then hand down the punishment, prison time. Reik expressed frustration with the refusal of Bush administration officials to testify before congressional committees, despite the fact…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2007
(from here by way of Mimus Pauly)
The Democrats rolled over on FISA legislation, giving Bush even more latitude in spying on his own citizens. As Josh Marshall put it:
Bush is getting practically everything he asked for.
He should have phrased that as a question because I can't figure out why they rolled over. Bush has a 25-30% percent approval rating. All the Democrats would have had to do is phrase their response as a question, "Do you trust George Bush with even more power?" and they win.
Still the most hapless political party in recorded history.
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2007I've called those movement conservatives who think that successful policy execution--in peace or war--is about "will", as opposed to, let's say, execution, Peter Pan conservatives. Atrios has a very good explanation of why they believe so strongly in will--their own personal experience:
I've been thinking about about certain Bushies - Bush himself, obviously, and Condi Rice - who seem to honestly believe that "will" and "resolve" are the way one gets things done instead of, you know, actually getting stuff done. I've finally decided that they're basically people have always gotten where they…
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2007Then Corn decides to get mean about it:
The Bush-Cheney years have been marked by ineptitude, miscalculation, and scandal. A successful presidency? Bush will be lucky if he gets a public elementary school in his adopted hometown of Crawford, Tex., named after him. He has placed this country in a hole.
It's actually a good catalog of everything El Jefe Maximo has screwed up.
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2007John Nichols, in an interview with Bill Moyers, clarifies a very important--and misunderstood--point about impeachment (italics mine):
JOHN NICHOLS: Bill Moyers, you are making a mistake. You are making a mistake that too many people make.
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
JOHN NICHOLS: You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2007I have no idea if Bush administration officials individually suffer from manifest antisocial personality disorder, but when you get enough of them together, they certainly do on an institutional level. Here's a relatively unremarked upon tidbit from the recent Surgeon General scandal:
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization's longtime ties to a "prominent family" that he refused to name.
"I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said.
The…
mikethemadbiologist | July 4, 2007Go read Hunter now. Here's a taste:
Eighteen months from now, on some mid-January day, Libby will of course be lauded for his great service to the nation -- that service in no way being the remarkable ability to keep his mouth tightly shut in face of a criminal investigation into activities at the White House, perish the thought -- and fully pardoned. Bush's statement about respecting jury opinions will be recast once again, this time to the effect of "I respect the jury opinions, but Scooter has had quite the rough time of it lately, what with all these investigations and indictments and…
mikethemadbiologist | July 3, 2007...and are you in any way, shape, or form surprised? Has anything in the last six years suggested to anyone in the Coalition of the Sane that the Bush/Cheney Administration has any sense of shame or propriety? Of course not.
It should be clear that this administration will do anything and everything it can get away with. Bush now appears to have 'accepted' his 28% approval ratings, and won't try to do anything to raise them.
The group that I'm truly disappointed in is the Democrats. They still seem to think that if they point out El Jefe Maximo's outrageous and illegal behavior that the…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2007I've made this point before: when you use the National Guard as a backdoor draft, instead of civil defense and disaster relief, people suffer. From Kansas:
The rebuilding effort in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas, likely will be hampered because some much-needed equipment is in Iraq, said that state's governor.
Governor Kathleen Sebelius said much of the National Guard equipment usually positioned around the state to respond to emergencies is gone. She said not having immediate access to things like tents, trucks and semitrailers will really handicap the rebuilding effort.
The Greensburg…
mikethemadbiologist | April 12, 2007I've never really considered myself an anonymous blogger, even though I blog under the pseudonym "Mike the Mad Biologist." I think about fifteen minutes of serious investigation would reveal my identity (nefarious as it is). It's more of a minor affectation than anything else. But two incidents in the past week illustrate why not having your name directly linked with criticism of Little Lord Pontchartrain might be a good thing.
First, via cookie jill, is this story about an anti-war activist trying to get a passport:
A local activist thinks the federal government is trying to prevent him…
mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2007Garry Wills, in an essay from the NY Review of Books, "Bush's Fringe Government", writes the following about the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain:
How do you govern an apostate nation? When the entire culture is corrupted, the country can only be morally governed in spite of itself. A collection of aggrieved minorities must seize the levers of power in every way possible. One must govern not from a broad consensual center but from activist fringes of morality. That has, in fact, been Karl Rove's strategy. He cultivates the extreme groups that are out of step with the broad consensus of…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2007The more you stare at this scandal, the more you feel like one of the proverbial blind men trying to figure out what the hell that elephant is. From ThinkProgress, here is what fired US Attorney Carol Lam might have been investigating:
To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who never held a federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier's check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated.
That should raise questions about the White House…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2007The good news is that the Senate overwhelmingly rescinded Bush's ability to appoint U.S. attorneys without Congressional approval--one of those 'terror-fighting' 'improvements' that somehow found its way into the Patriot Act. But the coverage of the investigation is awful.
MSNBC is headlining the investigation into the U.S. Attorney scandal as "Bush vs. Congress?" They have turned this into a pissing contest, when the actual story is about the potential abuse of the justice system for partisan purposes.
But seeing whose dick is bigger is far more entertaining, I suppose.
While we're on…
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2007
Hear the Mighty Roar of the Peter Pan Conservatives: those conservatives who think that policy failures are not due to strategic, tactical, or logistical flaws but solely due to to a lack of will. It appears that this way of thinking has completely permeated Little Lord Pontchartrain's brain. Neocon Irwin Stelzer had a luncheon meeting with the president. His description is chilling.
Stelzer describes four 'lessons' that were discussed. Here's the second lesson:
Second lesson: Will trumps wealth. The Romans, the tsars, and other rich world powers fell to poorer ones because they lacked…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2007
(from here)
Much has been written about the Scooter Libby verdict, so I don't have much commentary to add. However, I will make a prediction: Bush will not pardon Libby. Here's why:
The lord of the manor does not sacrifice himself for the serfs.
Underneath all the 'jus' people' duds, Bush is an aristocrat. He possesses the aristocrat's overweening sense of entitlement combined with a feral cunning used to preserve that prerogative. Little Lord Pontchartrain might actually feel for Libby, but he has been taught his entire life how to avoid becoming upset over the little people's problems…