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Sunday, February 01, 2004

Quick hits

. . . because I’ve only got two free hours and have to do some real work today.  But I thought it might be worth mentioning that at long last, the WMD have been found.  Huzzah!  Two whole pounds of cyanide, enough to . . . um, enough to . . . well, I don’t know, I’ve never had two pounds of cyanide lying around.  Maybe the AP wire can tell us:

A raid in April found nearly two pounds of a cyanide compound and other chemicals that could create enough poisonous gas to kill everyone inside a space as large as a big-chain bookstore or a small-town civic center.

Authorities also discovered nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, machine guns, silencers and remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases, plus pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons, and anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-government books.

OK, so these weapons were found in East Texas, not in Iraq.  So what?  What’s your point-- that Iraq was a better place under Saddam?  Call me a liberal hawk, but I’d support an invasion of Texas right now-- I don’t need any permission slips from Schroeder or Chirac.

That’s thing one.  Thing two:  updating my membership in Brad DeLong’s fan club.  Back on Wednesday he wrote a post that included this:

Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so… disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?

After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America’s fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn’t ignore it, didn’t shrug our shoulders, didn’t assume that it would be someone else’s problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it.

I do think there’s a reason for the trashing, and I think Brad DeLong knows very well what it is; it’s right there in Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, to which DeLong himself has provided such great color commentary in recent weeks.  Think of Cheney saying, in defense of the second round of insane tax cuts, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.  We won the midterm elections, this is our due.” This is our due!  We get more money!  Really, it’s like having a White House run by the degenerate superrich, you know, the kind who think they earned their inherited estates or who go around claiming that their Halliburton wealth had “nothing to do” with government support.  They really believe they’re entitled to rob the rest of us and hoard the proceeds unto the seventh generation-- and don’t just take it from me or from economists like DeLong, take it from one of the nation’s leading analysts of Bush fiscal policy, Ruben Bolling.  Anyway, DeLong has been en fuego all week.  Drop by and ask him to start offering coffee mugs inscribed with the words “disgusting, loathsome, contemptible.”

Last but not least, a friend writes to say that he’s tempted to pick the Panthers, 2-0, in triple overtime-- but then offers a “real” prediction of 24-20.  I say 13-10.  And Edwards in SC, Kerry everywhere else, though Clark comes in a statistical tie (as opposed to a Lieberman tie) for first in OK.

Now back to work.

Posted by Michael on 02/01 at 07:04 AM
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