"Politicians are not people who seek power in order to implement policies they think necessary. They are people who seek policies in order to attain power." — Evelyn Waugh Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has a review essay in The New York Review of Books (Cliffs Notes for the intellectual) in which he discusses two books that take an up-close look at President Bush and the entire Bush clan: Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty, and Ron Suskind and... Read more
Brad DeLong points us to this post from Andrew Sullivan in which, DeLong says, Sullivan expresses a "Claude Rains moment" of clarity. Here's what Sullivan writes: BUSH IS OUT OF IT: On the budget, this president is frighteningly unaware of the reality of his own legacy and policies. That's the only conclusion you can draw from his answers on Tim Russert. Either that, or he really is lying. That, in a nutshell, is what we've been calling "Reagan's Bind." Sullivan... Read more
I'm just about caught up with The New Yorker, finally reading many of the articles I told myself I would get around to later. One such article was Malcolm Gladwell's "Big Bad" in the Jan. 12 issue of the magazine. It appeared to be another critique of the SUV boom. I already dislike SUVs, for dozens of reasons, so an article that promised to give me even more reasons wasn't a top priority. As it turns out, Gladwell's topic is... Read more
Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic has begun a new blog on that magazine's Web site. It's called Iraq'd — in a nod to Ashton Kutcher's MTV show "Punk'd." Ackerman, like TNR overall and most of the folks who write for it, was a staunch advocate of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He's now rethinking that support, as he explains: If you're a pro-war liberal, chances are you're probably feeling burned right now. The case for the Iraq war rested... Read more
James K. Glassman had the misfortune of co-authoring a book titled Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. The book was published in 2000. Fortunately, Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, home of "The Bell Curve," where one can apparently be spectacularly wrong without damaging one's institutional standing as a pundit. In a recent column, Glassman takes a half-hearted stab at advancing the blame-the-spooks argument for the faulty use... Read more
John Kerry, John Edwards and Wesley Clark have to be pleased tonight. Kerry's wins in five states were particularly impressive when you consider that Tuesday began with USA Today accusing him of scandalous behavior. USA Today's article itself wasn't so bad — it was headlined "Kerry accuses Bush of caving on prescription drugs." But the headline link on the paper's online Politics front page accused the Massachusetts Senator of something far worse, reading: "Kerry fingers Bush on drugs." That's quite... Read more
I don't talk about primaries much — that's what we have Daily Kos for, after all. But since I chimed in earlier on Sen. Joe Lieberman's apparent Delaware Strategy, I should probably revisit the subject on primary day. I work in Delaware, but I don't live there or hang out there, and a newsroom isn't necessarily the best place to get a sense of what "the public" is thinking. Still, my sense from where I sit down in the First... Read more
Via Atrios, I find this editorial from the (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Star-Tribune. Since the Strib has put in place the World's Most Annoying Online Registration scheme, I'll quote at length: Now Bush is proposing an investigation of U.S. intelligence that would go on until 2005. Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, had it about right when he told the Washington Post, "They aren't giving up. They all prefer to retreat under a mist of controversy rather than... Read more
It is often the case in life that we find ourselves misled, thinking we know something we don't actually know. We may be misinformed, misled, deluded, ideologically blinded, confused by ambiguities or complexities — whatever the cause it happens to us all. It's part of what it means to be human. We may act on this mistaken information, or we may pass it on to others. Later, we may have to face the consequences of our misguided actions and, when... Read more
Here is Jim Hoagland in Sunday's Washington Post, arguing that the intelligence agencies are to blame for the false claims about Iraq's post-Gulf War I weapons capabilities: Bush and Blair accepted and actually believed the flawed intelligence that their spy bosses and senior aides provided, and then inflated it in their public speeches. Credulity, not chicanery, would be the plea, your honor. The trouble with this blame-the-CIA argument being advanced by Hoagland, Richard Perle and others is that it represents... Read more
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