The Republic of T.

Finally.

With this, I think Obama is off to a good start.

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Not to inject a bit of a downer after yesterday, but Keith Olberman’s eight minute take on the Bush administration is worth a look. Especially for anyone needs reminding of (a) how we got here and (b) why many of us were as glad to see Bush out as we were to see Obama inaugurated.

Todd Gitlin over at TPM Cafe has an interesting post up about Bernie Madoff’s smile.

Take a look at the NYT photo of Bernard Madoff arriving at court to hear a Federal judge uphold a lower-court decision that he may stay in his splendid apartment while out on $10 million bail.

…It’s his triumphant smile that interests me. Most Madoff photos display that same smile of controlled geniality. He knows all the angles. He knows how the game is played, that is, rigged. This is the smile of a man who knows. He knows the game. He knows you and he knows me. When he was ahead of the game, he basked in the glow of esteem. He relished the chance to grant favors. He prided himself in making his friends richer. When the house of cards collapsed, he was left standing. He believes that he will remain standing. He knows his good fortune has been to live in the right place at the right time to get his name engraved in cornerstones. He has probably worked out a way to feel like a martyr. Losers are schmucks. What he knows is what George W. Bush knows: God bless America, a country where he’s going to land on his feet.

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Ed. Note: The image below contains violent and explicit images and video footage. NSFW and possibly a trigger.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t paid much attention to Bush’s lame “victory lap,” as the clock finally runs out on his administration. I have no more stomach for hearing the man speak than I ever did before. And certainly not to hear him prattle on about his “legacy.”

Maybe it’s because I spent a good bit of the holiday rearching videos about how and why the United States came to join the company of those state that practice and/or facilitate torture.
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If you haven’t seen it yet, check the episode schedule and make sure you don’t miss the History Channel’s “Crash: The Next Great Depression?”.

This one-hour special looks at the current economic meltdown in the US and compares and contrasts it with what led up to the Great Depression, the 1929 Crash, its immediate aftermath and what helped to bring us out of the Depression. Threading first person accounts with expert interviews, the special lets viewers understand how much history is repeating itself and what does history tell us about our future?

Tonight, it followed (appropriately enough) the “Greed” episode of the History Channel’s series The Seven Deadly Sins.

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Never mind this guy.

If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop in Iraq, it’s these guys you should be concerned about.

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[Ed Note: Graphic NSFW images below the fold.]

As I write this, I’m watching president George W. Bush grant pardon to Stars and Stripes in 2003, on a television show about turkey. At the same time, I’m reading about another who seeks pardon from president Bush, and pondering the irony that the prisoner should have to seek pardon from someone whose crimes — the number and nature of which vary depending on whom you ask — outnumber his own and outweigh them in seriousness.

Not to mention who has the bigger body-count.

His name is bound to inspire fits of apoplexy, and plenty of people won’t read any further once he’s mentioned, but John Walker Lindh is seeking pardon.

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Source.

The winding down of the dark age of W feels like something like a long night’s journey into day. (Apologies to Eugene O’Neill.) Granted, Republicans are doing everything they can on their way out to make sure the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed a train. (More on that later.) But the world’s response to the incoming Obama administration is a nice reminder of what it’s like to live in a world where people are actually glad to see us when we show up.

As John Kerry put it when he dropped by the United Nations’ climate conference.

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I know I’ve said it before, but I just love Keith Olberman. This time, it’s his take on the Bush “legacy.”

After the previous post, it seems appropriate to move delusion to delusion. So, let’s look into the case of Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. In what world does Peggy Noonan reside? And what color is the sky there?

I ask because, though capable of surprising moments of clarity (which I hope to get to in a another post), her latest WSJ column sounds like a dispatch from the mental space to which Noonan decamped during the Clinton years, a place I’ve wondered about since her bid to let dolphins determine child custody and immigration policy — somewhere unrelated to the world I’ve been reading about in the headlines lately.

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In a previous post we explored the spectacle of George W. Bush bungling through an attempt at an expression of remorse — this time over the state of the economy — as only he can. It’s what you’d expect from a guy who believed he was on a mission from God, and has watched it go horribly wrong.

He still has to “Keep the faith,” and convince himself that all is pretty much as it should be, close enough, or well on its way there.

But the rest of us don’t.

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It’s sad. So sad.
It’s a sad, sad situation.
And it’s getting more and more absurd…
Oh, it seems to me,
that ‘sorry’ seems to be the hardest word.

Elton John, “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word”

Absurd. That seems like an appropriate word as we watch the “W” era wind down, as the perenially blameless commander in chief dons his usual “What, me worry?” grin while slathering himself with teflon. Because being George W. Bush has always meant never having to say you’re sorry.

Until now. And, still, not quite.

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There’s a literary reference that comes to mind when I consider “Drop Dead” conservatism. (My English Lit. degree occasionally comes in handy.) It’s a Shakespearean reference, actually, to a character from one of his lesser known plays. Timon of Athens made an impression on me in high school, when we read it in my senior English class. The title character was a man so embittered with humanity that in the he basically crawls into a hole in the ground and pulls the earth, writes his own epitaph, and dies.

That’s the kind of anger and nihilism — “total and absolute destructiveness, esp. toward the world at large and including oneself” — that “Drop Dead” conservatism brings to mind. But there’s a historical reference — involving another opening in the earth — that’s necessary to complete the picture of “Drop Dead” conservatism.

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Drop Dead. That’s the best answer that some conservatives have been able to offer to a country in teeth of the worst financial crisis we’ve faced in a generation. When the Wall Street crisis loomed and the bailout was being debated: let the market fail, and risk another Great Depression, “for the sake of the altar of the free market.” Now, the economic downturn having worsened — and in ways that are more deeply felt in parts of the country far from centers of financial or political power — their response to rescuing the largest remnant of our manufacturing sector? “Drop Dead,” and devil take the hindmost.

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Reading the headlines over the past week, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a single agency in the United States government that conservatives haven’t left in worse shape than they found it. I’ve been reading about demoralized government employees, under-resourced departments, and agencies left in shambles after eight years of Republican rule.

A few days after the election I participated in a telephone survey about the outcome. The surveyor, at one point, asked me how I felt about the Bush administration and the congressional Republicans. After a couple of tries at explaining conservative failure, I finally blurted out, “People hate government, and don’t believe it can do any good, just can’t govern effectively.”

After this week, I think I’d probably amend that statement. Conservatives don’t believe government doesn’t work. They believe it shouldn’t. And when they get elected they make damn sure it can’t.

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