Below I wrote " each of the four miracle preceding ... were implemented by anti-leftists who wanted to get it over with."
This gives me great hope for the World Bank and the USA as it seems anti-leftists are real eager for a lot of things to be over.
The pivotal turn in all of this came when the White House decided to essentially drop its support for Wolfowitz, with one senior administration official telling me the situation looks grim. "We want it over
and
Many of these congressmen believe that Rove should have quit when he was ahead as manager of the two Bush elections and left in January 2005. However, they do not want to see him limp out of Washington with his scalp hanging on Henry Waxman's belt. "We're not hostile to the administration," one prominent conservative House member who did not want his name used told me. "We just want it to be over."
Both via TBogg
Novakula seems a bit hostile himself -- to Rove and the concept of metaphor. Frog march is nothing compared to "limp out of Washington with his scalp hanging on Henry Waxman's belt." Think someone's irritated over disgracing himself outing Plame ?
Nothing is over with these Republican rotters....
ReplyDeletehttp://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/paul_krugman_do.html
May 18, 2007
Paul Krugman: Don't Blame Bush
Edited by Mark Thoma
Paul Krugman recently returned from vacation, but as you start to read this you may think he needs another one. Just keep reading:
NY Times: I've been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I've come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we've all been too hard on President Bush.
No, I haven't lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.
But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The ... rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush's policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it. ... For the most part, ... Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects.
There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume ... confronted the contenders with a hypothetical "24"-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.
Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen... Last week Gen. David Petraeus, ... circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or "other expedient methods..." is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the "moral high ground."
But aside from John McCain, ... the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don't get the access to lawyers ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo." His remarks were greeted with wild applause.
And torture isn't the only Bush legacy that seems destined to continue if a Republican becomes the next president. Mr. Bush got us into the Iraq quagmire by conflating Saddam with Al Qaeda... Well, Mr. Romney offers more of that. "There is a global jihadist effort," he warned... "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda..." Aren't Sunnis and Shiites killing each other, not coming together? Nevermind.
What about the administration's state of denial over Iraq, its unwillingness to face up to reality? None of the leading G.O.P. presidential contenders seem any different — certainly not Mr. McCain, who strolled through a Baghdad marketplace wearing a bulletproof vest, accompanied by more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees while attack helicopters flew overhead, then declared that his experience proved there are parts of Baghdad where you can "walk freely."
Finally, what about the Bush administration's trademark incompetence? ...[A]ppointing unqualified loyalists to key positions[?] [T]he base doesn't mind: the Bernie Kerik affair — Mr. Giuliani's attempt to get his corrupt, possibly mob-connected business partner appointed to head the department of homeland security — hasn't kept Mr. Giuliani from becoming the apparent front-runner...
What we need to realize is that the infamous "Bush bubble," the administration's no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there's a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.
And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.
anne
Nothing is over....
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/opinion/18fri4.html
May 18, 2007
Appointed Hobblers of Government
Across six years, the Bush administration has mocked all standards of conflict of interest by choosing private industry zealots for high regulatory posts — where they worked to roll back hundreds of rules on transportation, workplace and mine safety, the environment and other issues. The latest in this subversive chain must surely take the fox-in-the-henhouse statuette: President Bush has nominated Michael Baroody, lobbyist for the powerful National Association of Manufacturers, to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
If approved by the Senate, Mr. Baroody would be in charge of regulating corporate members of his association that have run up millions of dollars in civil fines for violating the commission’s safety rules affecting millions of consumers.
As if the White House’s colossal sellout to business power was not evident enough, Mr. Baroody’s executive friends at N.A.M. are sending him off with a lucrative forget-me-not — a $150,000 severance payment. Compensation experts find this extraordinary for someone supposedly volunteering for government service in behalf of taxpayers.
As a lobbyist for the N.A.M., Mr. Baroody was a key figure in industry’s successful campaign to water down commission standards requiring notice from companies about defective products, from toys to appliances. He has lobbied to limit the liability of asbestos makers in damage suits. He has lobbied against the growing statehouse campaign to require safer burning cigarettes, arguing this is a national issue. Imagine the priority this safety concern would receive from an agency run by Mr. Baroody....
anne
There has been another Paul Wolfowitz taken to government with every horrid Republican appointment these last 6 years. This is Republicanism, and such are the designers of Republicanism. George Bush is only the ptootypical Republican.
ReplyDeleteanne
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/opinion/18brooks.html
ReplyDeleteMay 18, 2007
The Insurgent Advantage
By DAVID BROOKS
Thanks to a series of organizational technological innovations, guerrilla insurgencies are increasingly able to take on and defeat nation-states.
[Here is the ultimate deceiving Republican rationale for the Republican destruction of democracy.]
anne
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04BROO.html?ex=1383282000&en=a52dd59eac5f7517&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
ReplyDeleteNovember 4, 2003
A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down
By DAVID BROOKS
It's not that we can't accept casualties. History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.
Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.
The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East....
[Here then is the contemporary Republican theorist.]
anne
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60C13FE355D0C728DDDA80994DB404482
ReplyDeleteAvoid War Crimes
To the Editor:
In ''A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down,'' David Brooks writes, ''Inevitably, there will be atrocities'' committed by our forces in Iraq. Did he forget to add that they must be prosecuted?
War crimes are indeed more likely if influential commentators foreshadow impunity for perpetrators of the ''brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt.''
The choice is not between committing war crimes and retreating ''into the paradise of our own innocence.'' A third option is for the United States to strive to avoid complicity.
It is untrue that ''we have to take morally hazardous action.'' Those who choose it, or urge others to, cannot evade or distribute responsibility by asserting that ''we live in a fallen world.''
BEN KIERNAN
New Haven, Nov. 4, 2003
The writer is director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.
anne
Notice the horrid consistency of Republicanism; the smiling barbarism of a David Brooks and on to a Mitt Romney.
ReplyDeleteanne
For a moment, just a moment, I was sympathetic to Paul Wolfowitz for what I supposed was only an inadvertent romance at the World Bank. Brad DeLong had to remind me what a thorough-going thug Wolfowitz always was and still is. The World Bank was only another venue for Wolfowitz and Republicans to practice at thuggery.
ReplyDeleteanne
Contemporary Republicanism has a mature philosophy of democratic subversion with is what this Administration and past Republican Congress has been about these last 6 1/2 years. Therein rests the subversion of the Justice Department and the purging even of Republican attorneys who did not properly understand the subversive intent.
ReplyDeleteanne