Socialism For the Rich and Free Enterprise for the Rest!

Edward Sorel

In the current Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchins says:

In a statement on the huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as “socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark — and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense — if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”

The Bush/McCain Record

Not much to add.

Bush and The Road to Ruin

Rob Rogers

Sophistry and the Bush Administration

On January 18 Paul Krugman published a column that contains the following quote:

All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.”

Wikipedia elaborates that:

A sophism is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. It might be crafted to seem logical while actually being wrong, or it might use difficult words and complicated sentences to intimidate the audience into agreeing, or it might appeal to the audience's prejudices and emotions rather than logic, like raising doubts towards the one asserting, rather than his assertion.

Seems to me this pretty much describes the entire Bush Administration starting with the stolen election, including misleading the country into invading and occupying Iraq, the unforgivable mishandling of Katrina and now the coming recession.

Spinning US Troop Casualties in Iraq

Juan Cole of Informed Content has a new column at Salon that discusses the latest Bush administration spin on the surge in Iraq. Predictably, the Bushies would have you believe that the surge is working despite the fact that the "political situation has deteriorated substantially."

What really caught my eye, however, is the trend of US Troop casualties in the month of July. The Bushies point to the death count of 80 as evidence that the surge is working because 80 US troops killed in action in Iraq is the lowest number since November '06 when 70 US troops were killed.

What does the trend look like when comparing the death count in July from previous years?

Click to enlarge

For more information, see Foreign Policy and Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

Census Reveals Texas Education Miracle...Or Not.

Kevin Drum over at The Washington Monthly notes the new data from the census bureau concerning high school graduation rates. The good news is that country wide we are at an all time high of 85%. Sadly Texas is dead last with 77%.

Quoting Kevin: "But there's good news for Texans: both George Bush and Rod Paige, the superintendent of the Houston school district and the man most closely associated with the "Texas Miracle," are gone. The bad news is that George Bush is now president of the United States and Rod Paige is his Secretary of Education."

Clueless, Duplicitous or Corrupt?

Or perhaps all three. Check this scathing report in Newsday today. Ken Fireman reminds us that "Bush ended every rally in 2000 by vowing to restore 'the honor and dignity' of the presidency." Sadly, things have not turned out as expected. The fecklessness, oh the fecklessness.

Pinocchio

Lies, lies, lies. What causes the impulse to lie even when no lie is needed? I read that Bush's Press Secretary blamed the President's fall from a mountain bike on recent heavy rain. Trouble is - you guessed it - there hadn't been any recent rain in Crawford.

If you saw Disney's Pinocchio you know why Dick Nixon was often portrayed with an ever lengthening nose. You are a rare bird indeed, however, if you are familiar with the original book serialized in Italy in 1881. The New York Review of Books and Alison Lurie, English Professor at Cornell give us the skinny here.