My brother, the bigtime columnist, sure knows how to write an arresting lede. Witness the start of an e-mail my brother sent to Dave Barry that wound up in Dave Barry's blog:
Hi! You once came to a party of mine and peed in my bushes.
But that's not why I'm writing.
Actually, Dan was promoting this both funny and serious contribution by Gene Weingarten to the Nieman Watchdog blog.
Ed Felton posts an annecdote that perfectly captures the absurdity of the Security Theater we all endure at airports.
I read once that if everyone has to go to the airport an hour earlier than they used to, the nation annually loses productivity equal to the amount of destruction that the 9/11 bombing cost. A little googling suggests that the number may be as low as half a World Trade Center bombing per year. [One estimate suggests that the annual value of time lost by business and leisure travelers because of airport delays in 1999 was $11.8 billion, while a different (2001) estimate put the cost of the of the WTC clearnup and reconstruction at $23 billion.] Even half a WTC per year is handing terrorists a major, continuing victory. Spending the money on useless show is handing terrorists a giant, continuing victory.
I call it the Bush tax.
I would be prepared to believe that an unfortunate accident with aging microfilm just happened to destroy Lt. Bush's personnel records for the three key months of his career so long as it could be shown that the same thing happened to many others, and so long as someone would come forward and say they were involved in the failed “restoration” project. Routinized military incompetence is something I can accept.
But it's darned odd that the Bush folks, who presumably knew about this destruction for several years never mentioned it.
And it's even odder that Bush — who promised he'd release all his military records — has nevertheless consistently refused to sign the waiver that would in fact make good on this promise. (In which context it is just short of amazing that the New York times buried this story deep in the paper rather than running it on the front page. SCLM indeed.)
Given that people have been doing a serious analysis of the Bush military records and have found many peculiar anomalies, things that are at least consistent with a pattern of cronyism and illegality, and given that the current administration lies about everything out of habit, well, excuse me if I need a little more reassurance that Occam's Razor doesn't lead you straight to skullduggery.
In Cheney as Grand Vizier, Brad DeLong wishes that the DC Press Corps would give him enough information to choose between competing theories of Cheney:
What I am hearing from senior Republicans I talk to who talk to people who are in the administration is confused. There are three theories about what is going on:
Theory 1 is, of course, that everything is wonderful. Theory 1 is that the Republican Party by accident stumbled upon a secret of American politics: that the presidency is too big a job for anyone. In 1981, therefore, they accidently divided the presidency into two: Ronald Reagan was Head-of-State, and gave speeches, and awarded medals, and went to events, and waved at the American people; James Baker was Head-of-Government, and did the job of running the country and the administration. Things fell apart in Reagan's second term when Baker decided he was sick of having all the work and little of the glory, decided he wanted to be Treasury Secretary, and switched jobs with Donald Regan. But once you got a new and competent Chief-of-Staff—Howard Baker—in as Head-of-Government, the machine hummed once again.
George W. Bush is, on this theory, a second-rate Ronald Reagan: somebody who can do the job of Head-of-State (although he does not excel at it), and leave the running of the government to those who know policy and politics: Cheney as Grand Vizier, with Andy Card as his deputy running the White House, Donald Rumsfeld as his deputy running foreign policy, and (originally) Paul O'Neill as his deputy running domestic policy. O'Neill didn't work out and had to be replaced. Colin Powell has still not quite internalized the fact that Donald Rumsfeld is really in charge of foreign policy—holds the job of deputy to the Vice President for foreign affairs. But otherwise things have gone fine: Cheney has headed up the government apparatus and made the tough and dangerous decisions, while George W. Bush has done the meeting-and-greeting.
Theory 2 is the other side of the coin that is theory 1. It is that George W. Bush is indeed Head-of-State and that Richard Cheney is Head-of-Government, but that Cheney is not a qualified and competent administrator-policymaker but incompetent, irrational, short-sighted, and no longer up to the job: a guy whose theory of government is “who the hell knows? And this will please the base.” If only Cheney could be levered out of power, and a new Head-of-Government installed—a strong Chief-of-Staff (i.e., not Andrew Card)—things would be fine.
Theory 3 is that George W. Bush was supposed to be Head-of-State, but that those who thought he would be satisfied to let other, wiser heads run the government were guilty of wishful thinking: that George W. Bush wants to be Head-of-Government as well. When he makes decisions, he makes snap judgments based on inadequate information (i.e., that the American economy's biggest problem is “SEC overreach”), and he will not revisit a decision once it has been made. Thus the task of managing George W. Bush is a ticklish one. He's not curious enough to seek out information on his own. So you have to (a) present him with a lump of information that will push him in the direction you want him to go and then (b) get him to immediately make the decision you want him to make—all the while guarding against your bureaucratic enemies who want the decision to go the other way.
Brad rejects Theory 1 on the grounds that our current leaders are demonstrably incompetent, but says that it's not possible to tell whether the fault lies in Cheney (theory 2) or in Bush (theory 3).
As an abstract matter, this all seems completely right, and will no doubt be a question of great interest to historians and biographers. Heck, I'm interested myself. Its practical payoff, however, only comes if Bush drops Cheney from the ticket — a choice that pits the Bush survival instinct against the never-admit-error reflex — or if one but not the other of them suddenly leaves office for some other reason. (Incidentally, I bet on the reflex over the instinct.)
Come November, I hope it all will be, well, academic.
Feedburner, the folks who despite being in 'pre-alpha' deployment provide my RDF and XML feeds, have a new gimmick they call a Headline Animator. Basically, they encourage users to put the following into the signature of every email:
Won't work for PINE users like me, but we're a rare breed.
Question: would this be an obnoxious thing to put in emails? Generally I don't like my emails to flicker at me. So I'm leaning against it. But it is sort of tempting.
Here's a new one on me: press releases sent out to blogs, with the choices probably scraped off the TLB Ecosystem. This one is about the labor practices of official suppliers to the Olympic Games. Since it's the first I've ever gotten, and the cause isn't repugnant, I figured I'd reprint it, just as I got it. But I doubt that I'll make a practice of this.
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