It’s a mystifying – and dangerous – combination: ignorance and arrogance.
The Bush Leaguers with all of their Straussian neocons and Liberty U. matchbook-cover lawyers are setting an example for the ages. PhD candidates for a thousand years will wrack their brains to understand how, in the creepy-crawly opening decade of the 21st century, pond scum rose to the top of the food chain.
It could become a new scholarly discipline – Incompetence Theory. If so, a couple of recent studies figure to be among the foundation documents.
In his book, How Doctors Think, Dr. Jerome Groopman cites research showing that, among radiologists, the worse their performance, the more certain they are that they’re right.
And in an extensive study reported last year, Dr. David Dunning found that people who do things poorly are most often blissfully confident about their abilities – much more so than people who actually do the work well.
On reflection, it shouldn’t be surprising that ignorant imbeciles are ignorant of their own imbecility. It takes competence to recognize incompetence.
When next God speaks to George Bush, she probably should tell him that. But maybe she has. What good would it do?
What Mendeleyev did for the elements we’ve now done for the toxic miscreants.
Here at last is a link to the Periodic Table of the Criminal Elements.
You’ll meet O’Reilly (Blovium), Cheney (Sneerium), Bush (Moron), Gonzales (Perjuron), Yoo (Humbuggium), Zell Miller (Obnoxygen), Feith, Scalia, Abramoff—the whole rogues gallery.
Disclosure: the unspeakable remains nameless. Karl Rove, who lies [sic] beyond all known scientific limits of coloration, odor, viscosity, and toxicity, has been left to wallow in his own elemental name, Rovium.
So you misplaced your tax records. Then you lost your return. The IRS sent you a letter, and you lost that. Keep it up, and guess where you’ll be spending your days. It’s your own dumb fault.
But turn it around. You’re a Texas bureaucrat in health and welfare. A mother files forms to renew treatment for her son with kidney cancer. You lose the paperwork. She files it again. She calls repeatedly. She faxes new copies of the “missing” documents. You misfile those. The boy’s eligibility expires. The treatment stops, and he dies.
So what happens to you, the homicidal bureaucrat? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, except that you might get a promotion or a bonus. After all, in Texas and elsewhere, there’s an ongoing campaign to undermine programs that deliver healthcare to poor and working class kids.
The incident is told by Bob Herbert in the New York Times (May 19 Op-Ed). But the story is repeated across the country, and no bureaucrat or legislator has been charged with murder.
Why not? Because when you screw up, it’s your fault, and you’d better fix it – or else. And when they screw up, it’s also your fault, and somehow you have to fix it even though they may screw up again and again until it’s too late.
Here’s what the law should say. If there is administrative confusion about an application or a claim, the claim should automatically and immediately be approved by default until the problem is resolved.
Just as you are (supposedly) innocent until proven guilty, you should be eligible until proven ineligible.
Until we get such laws – holding the perpetrators, not the victims, responsible – then bureaucrats are getting away with negligent homicide or second degree murder and other crimes of comisssion and omission. They should be called to account, and so should the legislators who for ideological or political reasons pressure the apparatchniks to kill and injure the people they are sworn to serve.
I want to suggest something I don’t know how to organize. Maybe somebody out there does.
How about a national Don’t-Drive Sunday?
Just stay at home for a day. If you skip 50 miles of driving, you’ll probably save $10 on gas plus whatever you would have spent when you got there. Use the money to pay down a credit card charging you 23% interest or a Sears account charging 33%.
A national Don’t-Drive Sunday would put a dent in Exxon Mobil’s obscene profits. Give Hugo Chavez, Dick Cheney, and some Arab princes pause for thought. Remind WalMart and other stores you don’t visit that day that they (and their lobbyists) have a stake in alternative fuels. Remind Congress we’ve seen through the $3+ gasoline and we know they’re in on the game.
Of course not everybody would, or even could, participate. It doesn’t matter. Even a 10% or 20% participation rate would save consumers at least a billion dollars and would rattle a lot of smug assumptions by people who think they were born to rule.
They do understand the language of money.
If consumers stay home, the jig is up. And a one-day consumer boycott now would remind them, there could be a much larger, longer, wider consumer strike in store.
“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.”
______
– Paul Krugman in the New York Times, after watching the second Republican candidates’ debate
Well, we missed our chance to reign supreme in the galaxy.
By now the U. S. would have a superconducting supercollider smashing protons into anti-protons and exploring the fundamental levers of power in the universe.
Thanks to grumps like Newt Gingrich, the French are going to get there first. The French and the Swiss and other European nations are nearing completion of the CERN supercollider under the French-Swiss border.
The U.S. supercollider was being constructed in Texas, and a great deal of money had already been spent. But in 1993, Congress pulled the plug, leaving miles of concrete tunnels – useless except for illegal immigrants streaming northward at 186,000 miles per second to blow fuses that Americans just won’t blow.
So the scientific frontier shifts to Europe. At stake is the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called “god particle” believed to confer the property of mass on other particles such as electrons and protons.
Could this provide an answer to the age-old question, “Can God create a rock too heavy for God to lift?”
Probably not. They’re French. They’re Swiss. They’ve built an overheated 17-mile electronic raceway 300 feet beneath a trail of melting chocolate.
Nancy, is impeachment still off the table?
As we’ve been been learning, scandal by scandal, most of the business of the federal government is under the table.
And where is the outrage? That must be under the table, too.
So why do we need a table?
If you’re playing doubles in tennis and somebody hits a ball that you should retrieve but you can’t, or you’re tired, you just yell to your partner, “Yours!”
That’s the brilliant idea Republican senators have settled on as Plan B for Iraq. They call it “benchmarks.”
They can’t back down and admit that the Democrats were right about setting a timetable for withdrawal. And they have no idea how to clean up Bush’s mess. So they decided to require the Iraqis to fix all the problems OR ELSE (Republicans are real tough).
| Aug. 1 |
Agree on how to divvy up the oil revenues. |
| Sep. 1 |
Set boundaries between Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions. |
| Oct. 1 |
Dismantle militias. |
| Nov. 1 |
Student loans. |
| Dec. 1 |
Cure for herpes. |
| Jan. 1 |
Theory of quantum gravity. |
| Feb. 1 |
Blow up Iran. |
| Mar. 1 |
Treaty with Israel. |
It’s the least they can do. And if they refuse, we should take our ball and bat and go home. Well before the 2008 elections.
Barb’s May 4 post (“Fu** the Troops”) detects the telltale spoor of Karl Rove, the evil prince of CSB (Crime Scene Beautification). As she points out, “Fund the troops” is the meretricious White House euphemism for “Fund the war” or “Keep on killing.” And, sure enough, the news media and even some Democrats fell for it and started using the term.
It’s one crime in a spree, clearly a spawn of the Rove modus operandi:
Holy words masking vile actions.
All you need to succeed in the Bush League is the ability to throw a curve ball low and into the dirt. It’s their only hope ever to be perceived as Major Leaguers and to escape moral, historical, sometimes criminal liability. Bush Leaguers believe the stepping stones to impunity, immunity, and glory are talking points, and that the point of talking points has nothing to do with honesty or democracy.
Thus, in Bush League dialect…
Torture is called “enhanced interrogation.” And when caught flat-footed in this lie, as at Abu Ghraib, then the culprits are “a few bad apples.” Bush Leaguers hope nobody will notice that the bad apples responsible are in the Cabinet and the White House.
Eavesdropping on Americans and prying into their medical and library records is “homeland security.” Actually, homeland security should be the term for inspecting containers at port facilities and protecting chemical and nuclear plants, but the Bush Leaguers don’t do enough of that to need a word for it.
Rigging elections is called “prosecuting voter fraud.” U. S. attorneys and their employees were chosen for loyalty to the Bush League (or fired for lack of it) and pressured to prosecute Democrats, protect Republicans, and scare minorities away from the polls.
The push toward a Theocracy goes under the name “faith-based initiatives.” At heart, the Bush Leaguers are Taliban.
Unlimited presidential power and a gutted Constitution are packaged as “the Patriot Act.”
Phantom enemies. There were phantom WMDs. Now Bush says we’re fighting “the enemy in Iraq.” Who’s that – the Shias? The Sunnis? The Kurds? The rug merchants?
Looters and polluters – utility companies and others – are allowed to double their emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides under what the Bush Leaguers call “the Clear Skies Act.”
Irreplaceable forests handed over to logging companies is “the Healthy Forests Initiative.”
Poisoning our streams by allowing the discharge of previously-banned carcinogens is called “the Clean Streams Act.”
Attack and Smear. Just as bad things get good names, good things get bad names. “Liberal,” which in the civilized world means generous, tolerant, and humane, becomes a dirty word in the Bush League. People who want to end the war are called “defeatists” who want to “cut and run” and who “don’t support the troops.” Meanwhile, the Bush Leaguers support the troops by sending them into battle without body armor, failing to armor their vehicles, repeatedly extending their tours while their families come apart, and letting them rot in cockroach-infested wards at Walter Reid when they come home wounded or disabled.
That’s the system. Every act of subversion, cronyism, and robbing from working people to give to the obscenely rich is framed as patriotic heroism. Every catastrophic blunder is a mission accomplished.
When the time finally comes to build the bookless Bush Library, we’ll pull one those FEMA trailers out of New Orleans and call it the Bushmobile.
We don’t indulge in ethnic humor here. No Alsatian jokes, no Okie canards. No sly snickers about the Polish space program which planned to land men on the sun and, to avoid burning them up, would send them at night. Nope, you’ll never see that here.
And people from Arkansas? Sure it’s a red state, but those folks never stop thinking, even after the “Tilt” light comes on. So please, if you’ve already seen this, you have absolutely no right to snigger and snort for a second time.
A lady in Hot Springs sent a letter to the editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette noting the abnormally warm weather that had brought out the leaves and blossoms and bugs and snakes much earlier than usual.
No surprise, she said, to any reasonable person because, after all, Congress had started Daylight Saving Time a month early this year. “You would think,” she wrote, “that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect than an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate.”
Her conclusion: another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat.
No, lady, that’s not the real threat.
