CapitalistImperialistPig

According to this HuffPost story , Wolfowitz blamed the media for his forced resignation. Departing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in a radio interview broadcast Monday blamed an overheated atmosphere at the bank and in the media for forcing him to resign. ... Wolfowitz's departure ends a two-year run at the development bank that was marked by controversy from the start, given his previous role as a major architect of the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon. Naturally he accepts no blame for his corrupt practices and general incompetence. But hey, I blamed the media for a lot so maybe I should give them credit here. Thanks media. You still owe us plenty.

Before Pasteur there was a common belief in spontaneous generation. The tendency of any undisturbed organic matter to erupt in teeming microscopic (and larger) creatures had convinced many that life was a spontaneously arising phenomenon. Pasteur disproved this, showing that life arose only from life and that insects and microscopic animals bred as true as larger lifeforms. Brad DeLong has discovered a sort of similar principle for The National Review Digging deep into the slime pit of the National Review archives, he unearths the slimy ancestors of today's National Review mold: The soberly-dressed "clerky" little man... seemed oddly unsuited to his unmentioned but implicit role of propagandist.... Let me say at once, for the benefit of the wicked, fearful South, that Martin Luther King wil never rouse a rabble; in fact, I doubt very much if he could keep a rabble awake... past its bedtime... lecture... delivered with all the force and fervor of the five-year-old who...

George Bush now has the same goal Gerald Ford did -- to prove he's not as bad as Nixon is the subtitle that Slate pins on this pretty good article by Bruce Reed. Actually, there doesn't seem to be any hint that Bush has even a clue as to what an unmitigated disaster his reign has been. Nixon was a very bad President, mainly because he was an unscrupulous and vengeful crook who always chose his own interests over the country's, but he wasn't stupid in the profoundly unself-critical way that George Bush is. Some things he did even benefitted the country. I see no evidence that Bush has any clue as to what history is likely to think of him or how to change that grim judgement. The most ruinous policies of Nixon were attempting to undermine the Constitution, wasting 25,000 American lives in a war that he knew was lost, and the misguided price controls that helped set the country up for subsequent problems. At least he didn't start the war he lost, and failed in his ef...

William Safire, speechwriter Spiro Agnew and former New York Times columnist, was on Meet the Press yesterday. Safire was recently honored with the so-called "Presidential Medal of Freedom," a recognition nowdays mainly reserved for those who have lied mightily in the service of George Bush and subsequently been proven disastrously wrong (think George Tenet). Steve Benen caught the show and thought that Safire might not be fully invested in reality: Safire wasn't alone in mentioning the war in Iraq, but his response was, shall we say, unique. "The Iraq story is obviously the big story of the year. And I look at the Trumanesque quality in the White House now. You have a president who is facing all this bad news coming out of Iraq and the casualties and the brink of civil war. And he's hanging in there and he's not admitting defeat, he's not embracing defeatism. And he's coming up with another approach, and who knows, he may turn it around." It ...