We’re wandering in the West. This morning, we’re taking our time, getting over colds and travel fatigue. I was reading about Tom Ridge’s assertion that Ashcroft and Rumsfeld pushed him to raise the Threat Level right before the 2004 election to give Bush a boost. I believe that probably happened. It’s consistent with the whole Bush thing of politicizing the DoJ, the DoD, the government.
I was thinking that besides the obnoxious Republicans, maybe the trouble Obama is having with health care is partly a reaction to eight years of government that couldn’t be believed. We’ve been fed such a pile of manure that we don’t trust anything we hear. We spend so much of our time trying to see the hidden agendae that we miss the point of the main course…
Doubtless a residue of my formative years in the ’60s, I’ve always been suspicious of portly white guys in suits who slick their hair straight back of their foreheads. My very first impression of Gov. Ridge was that he was a tool (in the sense of “a person manipulated by another for the latter’s own ends;) and the second impression was that he was an irretrievable bureaucrat when he came up with the hare-brained, reactionary and utterly ineffectual color-codes. Come on already – as Mr. Frank of Massachusetts recently intoned at a health-care town hall – on which planet are you spending most of your time Mr. Secretary. But tools, I think any but the most obsequious, snivelling and reprehensible, will often tire of the status…they have better opinions of themselves, they might actually think for themselves when left to their own devices and may be desirous of clearing the conscience…restoring their own sense of self as a person of integrity. Whether their tenure and actions as sycophants can be brought back to equilibrium is probably a God question. Still, one has to give Ridge credit for making the effort to expose the degree to which Rummy and Johnny and Dickie were directing all kinds of shit they had no business messing with.