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By Elton Beard There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't. |
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| ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE |
| Sunday, August 25, 2002 |
The consistency of Kaus. Mickey Kaus recently expressed approval for the administration's decision to save money by not informing American war veterans of their eligibility and entitlement to medical benefits, leading Jason McCullough to conclude that Kaus had finally crossed over to the dark side, Brad DeLong to respond that denizens of the dark side would not treat veterans as badly as Kaus, and Avedon Carol to define a taxonomy of darksiders in which Kaus fits as a "hustler with aristo ambitions".
Kaus's rationalization for cheating veterans out of their medical benefits is that the VA is a rotten system, but he has already used the same argument against a program that he professes to support.
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| Mickey Kaus |
Expanding participation in food stamps, as an end in itself, is a bad idea. Food stamps, after all, are a form of welfare (i.e., you can get them even if you're able-bodied but don't work). Since when should it be the goal of the Bush administration to run around trying to get more people signed up on welfare? ... I'm not urging that the government make it gratuitously hard for poor Americans to get the stamps if they decide they need them. But if they don't sign up because food stamps have the stigma and shame of welfare, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.Kaus, you see, is officially a Liberal. That's why he doesn't want to make it "gratuitously hard for poor Americans to get the stamps if they decide they need them". He merely wishes that needy Americans not be informed of their eligibility for assistance, or if they do find out, he wants to make them feel so ashamed of being poor that they - and their children - go hungry instead of asking for help.
He's been saying the same thing for a while. Back in 1999, when the Clinton administration instituted a program intended to increase the percentage of low income families eligible for food stamps that actually get them, Kaus called it "a really bad idea" because food stamps are like welfare and welfare is like, well, bad.
Here's my take. I think that Mickey Kaus is the journalistic equivalent of a Trojan horse, with a shtick designed to penetrate enemy defenses by masquerading as a liberal while spreading conservative memes (in this case the fear of a moral hazard). He's been doing this for years. And I don't know whether Kaus is a hustler, a true believer or both, but there is one thing I know for sure: Mickey Kaus is an imposter. At once an artifact and an agent of the dominant conservative media, he may sport a boomer-cool facade - but that man is no liberal. Reader beware.
| Friday, August 23, 2002 |
Distinguished in the field of evil. The editors of The New Republic put forth their best argument for the elimination of Saddam Hussein:
What is it, then, about the villain in Baghdad that should provoke the United States to rid the world of him? One spectacular thing: He is the only leader in the world with weapons of mass destruction who has used them. He used them against Iranian troops and against Kurdish civilians. This is what makes Saddam Hussein so distinguished in the field of evil.
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| Truman |
The second, more significant point, has to do with the circumstances of Saddam Hussein's use of WMD - specifically, mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents - during the Iran-Iraq war. The Reagan administration was fully aware of Saddam Hussein's use of poison gas at the time, as evidenced by the fact that top administration officials publicly condemned it, but at the same time the administration was secretly aiding the Iraqi war effort by having the Defense Intelligence Agency provide Iraq with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments, while the C.I.A. provided Iraq with satellite photography of the war front.
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| Defense Secretary Rumsfeld |
So if this is what makes Saddam Hussein so distinguished in the field of evil, what does it make his enablers? One of them is now our Secretary of Defense. Perhaps the next TNR editorial will be entitled "It Takes One to Know One".
| Wednesday, August 21, 2002 |
Uggabugga! Quiddity Quack, showing up to the party wearing the same print, proceeds to demonstrate how some in the press invisibly mend Bush's image.
8:30 PM PDT
Journalists not required.
| White House Photo |
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| George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld respond to questions from the press pool after their defense briefing at the Bush Ranch in Crawford, Texas, Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2002. |
6:45 PM PDT
Slipping grip.
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The Economist magazine ... headlined a recent article "The Disappearing Presidency." Someone might want to boil those three words down to a length suitable for the president's attention span and stick it under his nose.He said it, not me. And this from a former admirer, too.
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Bonanza. A couple of weeks ago, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer explained how war with Iraq, far from being costly, could actually yield a financial windfall:
MR. PETERSON: This one we'll have to finance ourselves; won't we?Wonderful. And Mr. Krauthammer is not alone in seeing big profits to be made from starting a war with an oil-rich country:MR. KRAUTHAMMER: If we win the war, we are in control of Iraq, it is the single largest source of oil in the world, it's got huge reserves, which have been suppressed because of Iraq's actions, and Saddam's. We will have a bonanza, a financial one, at the other end, if the war is successful.
[...]
MR. PETERSON: What if the military campaign spreads to Saudi Arabia? How will the generals feel about that?
MR. KRAUTHAMMER: That would be wonderful. I like it.
And a successful attack, followed by a successful re-building effort, could have an additional, lucrative bonus."If we have a friendly regime in Iraq, if we one way or another control the oil in Iraq, we can control the price of oil," said Robert Goodman, chief economist at Putnam Investments. "If we wind up with that kind of leverage after a war, there will be big short-term benefits."
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Good thing those big potential short-term benefits aren't distracting us from that other thing.
| Monday, August 19, 2002 |
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| Tommy Thompson |
The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing the federal government's financial support of more than a dozen prominent AIDS service organizations whose members joined in a noisy demonstration against Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson at last month's international AIDS conference in Barcelona.HHS officials said they launched the reviews at the request of 12 members of Congress, who also said they were upset by the absence of religious themes at the meeting.
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Busy, busy, busy. What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. |
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