rational geekery

A couple of Op-Ed's on Salon really give it to the White House.

The first, here, by Sidney Blumenthal, takes the President to task over his atrocious foreign policy: -

When Bush was president-elect, Bill Clinton's national security team informed him that a treaty with North Korea was essentially wrapped up. Incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell was enthusiastic. As president, Bush not only cut off diplomacy but also humiliated Powell and then South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung for seeking to continue the process associated with Clinton. In Bush's vacuum -- a series of empty threats -- North Korea predictably reacted with outrageous violations intended to capture U.S. attention. The U.S. negotiator, Charles "Jack" Pritchard, was constantly subverted by then Undersecretary of State John Bolton (Vice President Cheney's State Department mole). Quitting in 2003, Pritchard said, "I asked myself, 'What am I doing in government?'"

The second, a clever little review of the Bush Administration's sophistry over the deficits, here: -

How did the Republican Party ever get into the business of claiming that tax cuts in America today don't just expand the economy enough to make back some of the revenue lost, but expand it enough to make back all? It's not because any group of reality-based Republican economists believed it. In his 1998 book "Principles of Economics," Mankiw derided Ronald Reagan's early-'80s supply-side experiment as "fad economics" peddled by "snake oil salesm[e]n ... trying to sell a miracle cure." It's because a Republican journal of ideas called the Public Interest thought it would be a politically convenient claim to make. As its editor Irving Kristol later explained, his "own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems" arose because "the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority -- so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."