Column: Talkin' Bush Administration blues at the Fugue
Published Sept. 7, 2007
I had a conversation with some hippie the other night outside The Blue Fugue, and he asked about association with the College Democrats (I'm the former vice president) and my views on Iraq, etc. But he's not really concerned with my answers, though they do nominally jive with his ideological standpoint.
He's actually drunk and starts screaming about the military installations in Alaska that allegedly send large electrical pulses up to the ionosphere (also known as the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) that's supposed to be the military's best efforts at weather control. Hurricane Katrina? Yeah, it was really a military operation to get rid of the minorities and sinners in New Orleans.
At some point, I had enough and gave him directions to Wal-Mart and directions to where Brother Jed and Sister Cindy would be speaking the next day. I'm told it's Springfield, Mo., though I really hope that Jed and Cindy are preaching to the soldiers at that military base in Alaska, only because it'll take them a few weeks to wind their way back. Not that preaching to soldiers is really Brother Jed's style, because the U.S. military is the Hand of God, but I'm sure the average soldier probably commits what Jed considers mortal sins, including drinking beer and looking at women above the ankle. And I'm sure that at least some of them are Catholic.
I headed back into The Blue Fugue, where I'd been sucking down Chartreuse for the last half hour (if it's good enough for Oscar Wilde, it's good enough for me), where a friend told me about the latest big political story to hit the news.
Apparently Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, has finished a book on the efforts of the Bush administration to push the limits of executive power to a place where no man (or woman, beside Monica Lewinsky) has gone before. It's called "The Terror Presidency," and from the excerpts that have been published in The Washington Times and throughout the blogosphere, it'll be well worth getting - along with more Chartreuse.
It's kind of ironic: The best criticism (and by best, I mean most effective) of the Bush administration is that it's run by a bunch of idiots, full of sound and fury and signifying failure.
Ideological divisions aside, even neo-conservatives are beginning to come out of their nuclear fallout shelters in droves to attack the president and his close circle for their closed-mindedness, failure to seek compromise with Congress and dangerous encroachment of the executive branch on the power constitutionally delegated to the other branches of government or to the people.
I'm becoming convinced that even the neo-conservative wet dream that belonged to people such as Irving Kristol (if neoconservatives were a mafia, Kristol would be the Godfather) is viable, the Bush administration has completely ruined it.
Perhaps we would have done better to elect that guy who invented the "inter Webs" or that other fake Vietnam hero than elect Bush, who apparently quit drinking in 1986 after a conversation with Billy Graham, though the entirely reputable sources at Capitol Hill allege he's still knocking back the Johnnie Walker Blue.
It's telling that, as Goldman alleges in his book, some of the "top bureaucrats and officials" on Capitol Hill took every precaution to safeguard themselves from later criminal trials, because they feared that a different political atmosphere under a new administration would prosecute them for following orders.
Time for another drink at The Blue Fugue.