Defenders of W, the outgoing President, 43, Bush 2, Cheney’s mouthpiece, say that whatever his mistakes, at least he kept us safe.
This is ludicrous. Whoever happened to be President on September 11, 2001, would have “kept us safe.” Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Bill Clinton, Elmer Fudd (wait, he was President), any semi-competent individual would have “kept us safe.” The world changed on that day. Domestic security didn’t just step up a notch, it expanded exponentially. And it would have done so no matter who was in charge.
You think George was the only guy or gal under whom you would be taking off your shoes in order to board a plane? You think only George perceived the need to increase border security, to better monitor potential domestic terrorists, to make the CIA talk to the FBI?
Who was the enemy on September 11? A bunch of guys with box cutters who took over airplanes and crashed them into buildings. This tactic didn’t even survive until noon on that awful day, and it wasn’t George who led the way in countering it. A handful of citizens on the fourth hijacked plane gave their lives, but they prevented their plane from being used as a missile. The box cutter-airplane-building tactic worked for a few hours one morning, but a repeat is unlikely.
Would another President’s expanded domestic security program have taken a different shape? At the margins, certainly. And with more concern about Constitutional niceties, hopefully. But anyone who thinks things would have returned to pre-9/11 conditions has a screw loose. Whoever the President, a massive expansion of domestic security programs would have occurred, and their short-term success would have been very probable.
The world remains an unsafe place. The real dangers are not guys with box cutters but guys with nukes or germs. Preventing the bad guys from getting their hands on these types of weapons is the challenge for the years and decades ahead.
In the domestic security field, W deserves credit for doing his job, for doing what any competent individual in that position would have done. But implying that he did something extraordinary is nonsense
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
SO WHERE HAS CRANKY BEEN?
So where has Cranky been? Well, he’s been on Sabbatical. He observed that election we just came through. And he watched his modest investments become his pathetic investments. And he attempted to offset his financial decline through a new profession: document reviewer. And he contemplated the meaning of it all.
As for the election, wasn't it great how the party of self-righteousness, narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and anti-intellectualism got its comeuppance? I mean really, the Republican party of today is not the broad tent of Cranky's youth, which was back in the 1950s. Maybe the defeat will help it find itself and reconnect with the center of American society, culture, and economics.
Concerning the financial turmoil, the important question is, have we reached the bottom? That is also the unanswerable question. How did we get here? Well how about greed, ideological rigidity on the part of a sizeable portion of the nation's leadership, and stupidity? Wait, weren't similar characteristics in the preceding paragraph?
And document review? This is the unpleasant underbelly of the legal profession. It is a product of the computer age. Computers may have eliminated a tiny bit of paperwork, but their electronic records have made up the difference and added exponentially more garbage to the world. So big legal cases require worker bees to wade through hundreds of thousands—even millions—of assorted computer detritus: emails, memoranda, spreadsheets, whatall. The worker bees are an eclectic group of recent law school graduates, part-timers, between-jobbers, trying-to-find-themselves’ers, retirees, and other assorted riff-raff. They sit at computer terminals on long tables, supervised by young lawyers talented enough to get hired by a big time law firm but inexperienced enough to barely have a clue. But the pay ain’t bad, the jobs are temporary, and you get to see how the upper crust lives.
As for the meaning of it all, maybe another Sabbatical is in order.
As for the election, wasn't it great how the party of self-righteousness, narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and anti-intellectualism got its comeuppance? I mean really, the Republican party of today is not the broad tent of Cranky's youth, which was back in the 1950s. Maybe the defeat will help it find itself and reconnect with the center of American society, culture, and economics.
Concerning the financial turmoil, the important question is, have we reached the bottom? That is also the unanswerable question. How did we get here? Well how about greed, ideological rigidity on the part of a sizeable portion of the nation's leadership, and stupidity? Wait, weren't similar characteristics in the preceding paragraph?
And document review? This is the unpleasant underbelly of the legal profession. It is a product of the computer age. Computers may have eliminated a tiny bit of paperwork, but their electronic records have made up the difference and added exponentially more garbage to the world. So big legal cases require worker bees to wade through hundreds of thousands—even millions—of assorted computer detritus: emails, memoranda, spreadsheets, whatall. The worker bees are an eclectic group of recent law school graduates, part-timers, between-jobbers, trying-to-find-themselves’ers, retirees, and other assorted riff-raff. They sit at computer terminals on long tables, supervised by young lawyers talented enough to get hired by a big time law firm but inexperienced enough to barely have a clue. But the pay ain’t bad, the jobs are temporary, and you get to see how the upper crust lives.
As for the meaning of it all, maybe another Sabbatical is in order.
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