Chutzpah, classically, is killing your parents and throwing yourself on the mercy of the court because you are an orphan. Irony is John Ashcroft’s Justice Department investigating this in light of this new policy.
A further irony (can it be a mere coincidence?) is that Bush’s WMD scandal (like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s scandal) is not, as a primary matter, going to be about whether he lied to the nation about whether its national survival was threatend by tons of Iraq anthrax, chemical weapons, and nuclear bombs ready to strike us on a moment’s notice, but rather about leaking the name of a confidential government employee for political gain.
Update: Digby points out some connections between the Bush spin operation and the Blair spinner-in-chief Alastair Campbell, he of the ‘dodgy dossier’. Maybe it’s not a further irony, but just ‘what goes around comes around’?
If the Cubs can win the division title, then anything is possible (except Washington DC getting a team…). So please don’t tell me the Democrats can’t win a majority in the Senate. If the Cubs win the World Series, can Democrats dream of a two-house sweep, even despite the DeLay anti-hispanic redistricting in Texas?
Seriously, if senior Bush aides really outed a CIA agent for petty political pique, and the President didn’t lift a finger to investigate the matter for months, this will resonate in the heartland. Add in the constant drip, drip of casualties, plus reservists serving longer tours than anyone expected without much feeling of achievement, not to mention respected commentators saying Bush is destroying the Army, and economists nearly unaninimous that Bush is destroying the economy, it is now possible to imagine an electoral dynamic in which Republican congresspeople run away from the Bush White House. And in which their opponents make hay by tying them to Bush policies.
It is no more inevitable than the Cubs winning. But never say never.
Via IPKat, a nice English blog devoted to intellectual property, comes a pointer to a New Scientist article reproducing an unusually agressive online warning against misappropriation of text and images: “My intellectual property attorney is a scary-smart guy. He was the youngest person to ever pass the bar exam in his state. Plus he put himself through law school by working as a professional wrestler. I am not making this up.”
It reminds me of when I was in private practice. I spent most of my relatively short career in the London office of a US firm, serving European clients. After a while, I began to understand why certain ones of them liked taking a US lawyer to meetings. To them, it was a way of signalling to their European counterparts, ‘See my legal pitbull. Be nice, or I’ll sic him on you.’