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Vox Clamatis...

The good, the bad and the ludicrous

Well here in deserto the news over the last two weeks has been good and bad. On the good side Rush Limbaugh has now had to officially add Racist Junkie Hypocrite to the Big Fat Idiot which normally proceeds his name. In general we should have some sympathy for anyone suffering from addiction, but Rush is the exception that proves the rule.

Continuing the good news, a story the Ebbtide printed on Sept. 22 — about the White House’s attempt to silence dissent by disclosing that the wife of administration critic Ambassador Joseph Wilson worked undercover for the CIA — was finally getting big play in the media. On the down side, Bush’s pledge to cooperate in the investigation of this leak was immediately shown to be a lie. Documents produced by White House staffers are now undergoing scrutiny by White House counsel to make sure that nothing useful to the investigators actually gets released to them.

In the decidedly mixed category comes the news that, in the latest round of palace intrigue, Condaleeza Rice sandbagged Donald Rumsfeld. Now the Iraq situation is going to come to some unknown degree under her control or scrutiny. At least Rumsfeld is a professional bureaucrat with plenty of experience at the Defense Department while Rice is about as qualified to run a war and occupation as Arnold Schwarzenegger is to run California.

Speaking of, further down on the down side has been the news from California. In a bread-and-circuses election (Republicans with bread, and we get the circus) the electorate of the Golden State seemed to be trying to emulate the ancient Romans who at one point had a horse added to their Senate. Well, the Romans still have the record on this one, as California only got half a horse, and the south end of a horse headed north at that.

Now the fifth-largest economy in the world is going to be led by a guy who has spent fully one-half of his adult life staring at his own ass in the mirror. It’s enough to make one wish for the IQ necessary to become a WWE fan. The only good part of the news from California is that the ideas of the Republican Party will finally be spoken with the accent in which they were originally written.

Back on the up side, Princeton economist, NY Times columnist and forthright Bush critic Paul Krugman was in town appearing at Kane Hall on Oct. 8 (see article, this issue) and Town Hall the following evening. The Ebbtide had a chance to speak with Krugman and here is some of what he had to say when we asked him about the governor-elect.

“It’s pretty disheartening Schwarzenegger never gave any coherent answer to what he would actually do. It was oral: ‘I’m going to cut taxes and not cut programs,’ and what was disheartening was that neither the public nor the press actually challenged him to explain what he was going to do.

“I actually think he’s going to be very sorry, because reality hits very soon. He’s definitely pledged to undo the increase in the vehicle tax, and he’s definitely pledged not to cut education spending, and he’s about to discover that two plus two does equal four after all. The good news, I hope, is that he does, like Bloomberg in New York has actually done, the right thing … It’s going to be fun to watch. Actually, not really, I’m glad I don’t live there.”

Krugman is right of course. The California election is another example of the complete worthlessness of the national news media. They could have forced Schwarzenegger to answer hard questions about how he planned to deal with the state’s financial crisis. They could have noted that the whole recall was just dollar democracy and a right-wing power grab. They should have said in the beginning that the recall was nothing more than a circus, and Arnold was the lead clown. If they had, it wouldn’t have been even-handed, but it would have been fair, objective and most importantly, true.