January 11, 2007
2 bizzy 2 blog...
But here are several items I might comment on if I had time...
...The bureaucracy -- the CIA, the State Department, the Justice Department and others -- has waged an unrelenting war on Bush administration foreign policy specifically and on the Bush administration generally. They have waged this war in blatant disregard to their own legal obligations and to the rule of law. At every step of the way, they have waged this war in partnership with the New York Times and the Washington Post. The lack of interest in Gerstein's story among the mainsteam media is, like the unnamed dog that didn't bark in the classic Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze," a clue to the identity of the wrongdoers...
Anchoress...
Good long post on all the things various Dems were FOR (such as a "surge") until Bush was for them--now they're against them. The Democrat Party is the obvious home for nihilists, so I think its long-term prospects are fairly good. Nihilists seem to be a renewable resource...
...TWO OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST prominent Republican governors have taken on the health care monster. One is current presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the other is the country’s funnest governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their approaches could not be more different....Posted by John Weidner at January 11, 2007 09:57 AM
For your first item, don't all of those people work for President Bush? At what point does Bush have to take responsibility for not cleaning house over there?
On the other hand, I have to say my level of respect for Condoleeza Rice has taken a big hit since she became Secretary of State. It's one thing to not be able to rapidly reign in a sprawling bureauocracy like that, it's another to join in as she too frequently has. Maybe it's some structural defect which is no longer humanly correctable without a from the ground up rebuild.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at January 11, 2007 11:42 AMI definitely blame Bush in a big way. There seems to be a passivity at work that probably goes all the way to the top. It drives me nuts.
Of course it's almost impossible to fire the bureaucrats, but we should be fighting for everything we can get.
State is apparently especially hard to fix. I once blogged about a case where a State Dept employee was convicted of embezzlement and served time. And STILL could not be fired.
However, once upon a time we had a Republican majority in Congress. And I never heard of any attempts to fix things like this.
Posted by: John Weidner at January 11, 2007 12:05 PM
