Tuesday, January 13, 2009

One week

There are times when the period between the election and the inauguration is bittersweet, when the outgoing president is popular and has accomplished great things.

We haven’t had one of those in a while.

There are other times when that period is merely uninteresting; the president does little besides issue last-minute pardons, and the president-elect puts together a cabinet.

We have reason to miss dull transitions at this point.

It seems that our outgoing administration is bound and determined to make sure that our president-elect inherits a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The sheer amount of incompetence has produced an equal impatience on the part of 75–80% of Americans to see the end of this administration. It just can’t happen soon enough.

Yet we have to put up with the “legacy polishing” for a while. This consists of members of the outgoing administration emitting lies at high velocity hoping some of them will stick to actual brains (as opposed to the slavering groupies they prefer to surround themselves with). It’s been going on for weeks now, this Rovian blast of slimy falsehoods and crazy delusion.

He has got this great compassion which was not just a slogan, “compassionate conservative.” It is who he is. It is one of the great things he brought to this office. . . . This is the one thing that just drives me crazy, that somehow this is an arrogant administration, an arrogant president running an arrogant policy. This guy—one thing he is not is arrogant.

—Stephen Hadley, national security advisor

. . . Everybody who has actual personal exposure to the president, almost everybody, appreciates what a good leader he is, how smart he is and, especially, how humane he is.

—Josh Bolton, White House chief of staff

. . . For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.

—Alberto “Obstruction” Gonzales, former attorney general

Here at home we prevented numerous terrorist attacks—including an attempt to bomb fuel tanks at JFK Airport, a plot to blow up airliners bound for the East Coast, a scheme to attack a shopping mall in the Chicago area, and a plan to destroy the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles.

—GWB, conveniently forgetting which terrorist plots were bogus

It goes on and on, and has for months now.

Why the news media continues to allow these people to push such ridiculous falsehoods without challenge is baffling.

Sarah Palin is back at it as well, blaming the media for her vapid responses under the onslaught that is Katie Couric and Charles Gibson.

I sure hope this addiction to lying will fall out of vogue with the new administration.

It also pains me to see that my prediction about Norm Coleman came true: in spite of a certified win by Al Franken, Coleman is claiming all sorts of shenanigans and is going to go to court to try to bollux up the process.

There hasn’t been much to say about Blagojevich. He’s appalling, but on the scale set by this administration, it’s hard to get worked up over. It may cost the Democrats a Senate seat in 2010, of course.

Other than that, I’ve just been holding my breath, waiting for the inauguration, hoping that the present administration doesn’t screw things up fatally. Unfortunately, it’s done a very good job of that, incompetently handling the bank bailout, screwing with the auto-industry bailout, guaranteeing higher unemployment and catastrophic failures in the flow of money (which, of course, they’re crazily blaming on the Clinton administration). I’m just hoping that the guys Obama is bringing in have a good plan for recovery. Even if it involves increased spending, and higher taxes, I’d rather have that than another Great Depression.

What fools Bush and his cronies have been.