Breaking Blog Silence

After viewing the "Fog of War" I predicted that Paul Wolfowitz would be the Robert McNamara of the Bush Administration. Bill Keller's favorable NY Timese Magazine profile of the Asst. Secretary of Defense makes Wolfowitz sound like a modern version of the Whiz Kids that managed the Vietnam War. Wolfowitz has now advanced one step further down the road to becoming Robert McNamara. President Bush has selected Paul Wolfwotiz to head up the World Bank (ABC News), a posistion that McNamara once occupied. It is only a matter of time before Wolfowitz is on film weepily recounting his awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Throwing Down

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has called Alan Greenspan out:
I'm not a big Greenspan fan -- Alan Greenspan fan. I voted against him the last two times. I think he's one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington. The fact of the matter is, he told us when we were in power and Clinton was president the biggest problem facing the American people was the deficit. And we did something about it. We, during the Clinton years, paid down the debt by about a half a trillion dollars.

Why doesn't he respond to the Republicans and tell them the big problem here is the debt that this administration is created? We had a $7 trillion surplus when Bush took office, now we have a $3 or $4 trillion deficit. That's, in fact, what Greenspan should be telling people.

In his youth Greenspan was an admirer of Ayn Rand and worked for an objectivist think tank. He has since devoted his career to advancing the objectivist agenda and has never missed an opportunity to hurt working Americans.* It is about time that someone called him out on this. Not surprisingly he is a loyal Republican, as indicated by his political donations. In addition to backing the first President Bush and Bob Dole (for senate), Greenspan has also given aid and comfort to Jesse Helms. You may remeber Helms as the most evil memeber of the US Senate untill his retirement in 2002. Helms was an unreconstructed segregationist and used race baiting advertisments to win his re-election campaign in 1992.

*Don't believe me? I have cartoons to back me up! They are available here and elsewhere.

Annoying People

"Jane Galt" identifies another irritating prostlyizer: the evangelical atheist. In a post yesterday, she wrote:

Anyone who's lived in a Blue State has probably encountered the problem of the Evangelical Atheist . . . the person who has discovered the Void and considers it their bounden duty to share their newfound joy with everyone around them, through force if necessary. Having lived in the born again Christian wing of my freshman dorm, I find that EA's, not fundamentalists, seem to be the undisputed champions of arrogant, intolerant, pig-headed religious boorishness. The fundamentalists who so earnestly tried to bring me into the fold were, after all, just trying to save me from an awful eternity in hell. The EA's are trying to save people from wasting two hours on Sunday morning. And no fundamentalist I've ever met has ever been so thoroughly oblivious to the possibility that they might be wrong.

The evangelical atheists truly are more annoying than evangelical Christians. The evangelical atheists do have one redeeming quality: they are relatively harmless. If they had their way than at worst we would have a pledge of allegiance that was shorter by a few words and a line no one ever reads removed from our currency. The same can not be said for the fundementalists, whose program is actually quite noxious, particulary with regards to non-symbolic issues like gay rights, foreign policy and book learnin'.

Low Pro

An excerpt from First Person, the "astonishingly frank self-portrait by Russia's President, Valdmir Putin", the produce of a series of interviews with the Philadelphia Inquirer:

There are reports that you took part in an operation called Lightbeam:
I don't know, exactly. I wasn't involved in it. I don't even know if it was executed or not...

Well, they wanted to portray you as a s super-spy. And you're denying everything. But then why did you get promoted?
For concrete results in my work-that's what it was called. Success was measured by the quantity of realized units of information. If you procuired information from the sources you had at your disposal, put it together, and sent it to the releveant offices, you would obtain the appropriate evaluations.