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If You Said to Me, Name 25 Million People Who Would Maybe Be President… He Wouldn’t Have Been in That Category: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong’s Webjournal

Never yet has a grownup looked me in the eye and said, “George W. Bush is qualified to be President of the United States.” The most anyone has ever done is to say (around the time of the inauguration), “Look, Brad, he’ll be Queen Elizabeth; Colin Powell will be Tony Blair and Paul O’Neill will be Gordon Brown. There are lots of Head-of-State things that George W. Bush will do really well, and the government will be in good hands.” But I don’t think any grownup would say that or anything like that now.

You know, I think we elected Bush because back in 2000 nobody really thought it would make a difference. When he was elected I remember thinking how relatively peaceful the past 8 years had been and that, with any luck, we’d make it through another four years and nothing major would happen and we’d just vote Bush out of office and that would be that. Lesson learned. It does matter. It matters who we vote for. The only thing I can’t believe now is that anyone really gets worked up over his performance. Who was fooled into thinking he was a great statesman in the first place?

By way of Cruel Site of the Day...

www.haroldpinter.org – American Football

Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. This is sloppy.

The Washington Monthly

RENO NOT FOCUSED ON AL-QAEDA….I haven’t been watching today’s testimony, but CNN reports that Janet Reno told the commission, “I never focused on al Qaeda, because I stood there and watched the Murrah Building (in Oklahoma City) in rubble.”

I’m not sure what the context of that statement was, but it seems like a reasonably frank admission of an obvious truth. It’s too late now, of course, but I still think Bush and Rice would have been better off saying something along these lines all along.

Actually, Reno said “I never focused just on al Qaeda…” (emphasis mine) Makes a big difference, doesn’t it… the omission of that little word?

Kevin Drum, I’m surprised at you. You’re smarter than this. Here’s a clue: If you start an entry about, say, nationally broadcast testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission by writing, “I haven’t been watching today’s testimony,” perhaps you should strongly consider not finishing that post.

I see by the old calendar on the sidebar that I’ve been silent here for almost a week. Yikes. Well, I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve been moving my roommate out of my apartment and fiancée in. John left on Monday for Orlando, and Louise and I have been shuffling furniture around, cleaning, sorting, making trash runs and Goodwill jaunts and generally getting the place into livable order. We’ve just got one more room to unbag and unbox, so I can finally start relaxing and start catching up on sleep.

Thanks to our friends Cliff and Jill for coming by over the weekend and helping us lug all our stuff up to our 3rd floor apartment. We couldn’t have done it without ya!

Godspeed, John. Write me from Mickeyville.

Dr. Andrew Kline’s Press-Politics Journal is an educational analysis of modern public rhetoric. Today, he responds to an article by Nancy Gibbs on CNN.com, which points out that charges of flip-flopping are often a personal attack rather than a political one…

Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal: Do the flip-flop boogie, part 2…

I think Gibbs is correct that such charges often are personal attacks. Anyone who has spent any time at all in governance (notice I didn’t write “politics”) understands the roles of compromise and change in a democratic republic. Further, thoughtful people understand that minds can and do change based on, among other things, new information, new experiences, changing situations, effective arguments, and political expediency.

Actually, flip-flopping can be a virtue, a mark of character. In fact, we want people to flip-flop on a whole range of issues – racism, illegal drug use, whether or not someone has an abortion. The whole point of taking a stand is to convince people to your side of the issue. A well-reasoned argument or a meaningful event might well cause minds to change. Like Nancy Gibbs points out, we don’t really want people to be consistent as much as we want them to be properly responsive to outside stimulus. What we don’t want is for our politicians to change votes for personal or political gain. To suggest that flip-flopping is undesirable ipso facto is simply absurd.

Meantime, Al Franken points out that John Kerry has, in fact been remarkably consistent in his political views. Not perfect, but a heck of a lot better than the Republican flacks would have us believe.

Thanks Reason you’ve shown me the April Fools Spirit is alive in me after all! And you did it all in the space of one little nap!

Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes Of All Time

Also, see the Gizmodo Mid-Afternoon April Fool’s Roundup

See, it’s this stuff that I was talking about just now…

Boing Boing: Senator Daschle’s statement on the abuse of government power

On Bruce Sterling’s blog – the text of Senator Tom Daschle’s March 30 Floor Statement on the Abuse of Government Power.
In recent days leading congressional Republicans are now calling for an investigation into Mr. Clarke. As I mentioned earlier, Secretary O’Neill was also subjected to an investigation. Clarke and O’Neill sought legal and classification review of any information in their books before they were published.

Nonetheless, our colleagues tell us these two should be investigated, at the same time there has been no Senate investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity as a deep cover CIA agent; no thorough investigation into whether leading Administration officials misrepresented the intelligence regarding threats posed by Iraq; no Senate hearings into the threat the chief Medicare Actuary faced for trying to do his job; and no Senate investigation into the reports of continued overcharging by Halliburton for its work in Iraq.

So, it’s April 1st. April Fools’ Day. I must admit, I’m feeling a bit like an April Fools’ Grinch. I’ve already been “gotcha’d” twice – once by a report of an Apple G5 with three processors, once by a report that there was another major announcement from the Mars rover team. Lord knows how much hokum I’ve swallowed whole from the blogosphere today. I guess my problem is that, given the level of discourse I encounter most days, given the slippage of ethics in journalism, given the inability of most people to spot logical fallacies and other rhetorical blunders, and given that I’ve pretty much come to depend on comedy news shows and newspaper satires to deliver the kind of insightful news commentary I once depended on the real world to provide, at this point it’s really hard to distinguish April Fools’ Day from the rest of the year.

What is an April Fools’ joke supposed to be, anyway? It can be a simple dime store gag, I suppose, like a joy buzzer or a pen that squirts disappearing ink. However, when I think of the classic fools I’ve encountered, I think of TV news reports like the spaghetti-growing bushes of Italy, or the farm that raises branchless trees for use as telephone poles. I think of any number of newspaper and magazine satires that were so well written that I really needed to check the date and the byline closely for clues that it was a joke.

A joke is a surprise on the mind. It’s like a head fake on the basketball court, getting you to move your mind one way while the joke goes the other. Laughter is the delightful recognition of the skill of the joke teller. I think we laugh at jokes because we recognize their fundamental truth, and the fundamental truth is that our conscious experience is not so linear or predictable as we’d like to believe. Meaning bifurcates, recurses, twists itself into a Gordian Knot. It is only through our conscious efforts that we construct a livable reality based on common perceptions, one which allows us to participate in a society.

But it seems to me that too much of what I encounter these days online, in the media, and from the political arena is like a bad joke. Our administration lies to justify a war, then denies that it lied, even in the face of proof. Journalists like Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley make up stories out of whole cloth. Members of the administration, who have continued to promote their handling of the 9/11 crisis as evidence of brave and capable leadership, refuse to testify before the 9/11 Committee, or agree only under bizarre conditions. Fox News calls itself “Fair and Balanced.” Wolf Blitzer insinuates that Richard Clarke’s personal life is “weird.” CNN lies that David Letterman doctored a video.

When challenged, the common defense these days is to attack the challenger, to question the perception of truth, or to further obfuscate details of the original event. The defenders turn the question on its head and pretend that, no, the challengers must be the ones that are mistaken. Like joke-tellers, they try to fake us one way and move the other. They depend on our innate understanding that meaning is fungible to maintain their veneer of infallibility. They thwart our attempts to straighten out the tangled threads of truth, to divine reason from bullshit, to construct a foundation of common perception that might provide a platform for social maturity. Through blinkered self-interest, those who wish to maintain their power weaken us all.

What is increasingly apparent in modern public discourse, is that there are certain powerful interests whose disdain for truth and accountability boggles the mind. It’s not too much to say that this behavior is anti-social and culturally destructive. Lack of accountability to the truth is hurting our ability to function as a society because it is undermining the trust in the people and institutions we depend on to inform us and keep us safe.

I’m no Cassandra. I’m actually optimistic that bloggers and others in the online community are finding a way to fight back, to hold people accountable and to highlight issues that might otherwise be glossed over. But watching the culture of distortion become increasingly transparent lately has left me with a hole in my heart that just isn’t somehow patched over by making a good joke. Where’s the fun in writing an Aprili Fools satire when the people in the institutions I look up to do a much better job of satirizing themselves on a daily basis?

Ah, hell. I’ll just go read The Onion and get over it.

Happy April Fools, y’all.

And I was worried that I’d never find anything good to write about on April Fool’s Day. Thanks be to As the Apple Turns for including a link to Pythonland – Keeping the World Silly Since 2002. The site has all the words from each Monty Python episode, plus links to other cool Python sites. For a Python geek like me, it’s heaven on earth. Er, in cyberspace, anyways.