Quote/Unquote 2006 April

... China bears scant resemblance to the one Mao left behind in 1976. But even as a pragmatic philosophy of"market-Leninism" has taken hold, there has never been a real repudiation of Mao. The official line has remained the one laid out in 1981 by Deng Xiaoping (who was raised to the heights of power by Mao, purged, and then rehabilitated)--that Mao was"70 percent right, 30 percent wrong."

Imagine the scandal if a postwar German leader had said that Hitler was"70 percent right." Or if a current leader of Cambodia said the same thing about Pol Pot. Yet, in spite of being responsible for more peacetime deaths (an estimated 70 million) than the other great monsters of the 20th century, Mao has, at least until recently, occupied a different place in Western opinion. Wearing a Mao button or T-shirt is still seen in some quarters as kitschy fun in a way that a tribute to Hitler or Stalin would not be. There's even a bestselling business book called The Little Red Book of Selling. Don't look for the Mein Kampf of Investing anytime soon.

In another reminder that George W. Bush has still not caught the man responsible for September 11, while he has mired tends of thousands of US troops in an unrelated Iraq quagmire, the murderous lunatic Usamah Bin Laden spoke again on Sunday. I don't know how Bush lives with himself. He has squandered 5 years of unparalleled power and opportunities, and has nothing to show for it but national bankruptcy and national humiliation.

WEEK of April 17, 2006

America's greatest growth spurts in both the 1800s and the 1980s were during those times of incredible foreign influxes of capital. And yes, there were those naysayers who warned about those"untrustworthy" British, then, later, the Japanese. Funny, we seemed to have buried both of them. I'm no banker, but I do know the old rule, if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has a problem. The very size of the capital inflows suggests that it is the Chinese who need to be concerned, not us.

WEEK of April 10, 2006

It is Karl Marx's specter"haunting Europe." It is Betty Friedan's"problem with no name." It is the question history students from junior high through graduate school asks:"Why do my history courses never reach very close to the present?"

As disclosed by London's Daily Telegraph on Feb. 25, 2006, the Pentagon has renamed what for nearly five years was called the"war on terror" the"long war." The term has not caught on – no surprise there – so the Department of Defense has been trying anew in recent days to get it accepted.

Top Reasons You Wouldn't Want a Mobile Biological Weapons Lab

Not only did Bush and Cheney and Libby tell bare-faced lies about the alleged"mobile biological weapons labs" in Iraq, the idea of such never made any sense anyway.

1. How could you have a clean room in a mobile biological weapons laboratory?
2. Petrie dishes might vibrate off the table.
3. Germs might get carsick. Now that's something you don't want to have to clean up.
4. Biologists keep pulling up at the drive-through at McDonald's.
5. What if you hit a big bump while working on the plague?

Talk about a fearful symmetry.

Iran was whipping up real uranium while America was whipped up by fake uranium.

Obsessed with going to war against a Middle East country that had no nuclear weapon, the Bush administration lost focus on and leverage over a Middle East country hurtling toward a nuclear weapon.

That's after the Bush crew lost focus on and leverage over an Asian country that says it has now produced a whole bunch of nuclear weapons.

To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, these guys wouldn't have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

WEEK of April 3, 2006

Late night comedian Conan O'Brian does a shtick where he has a silly computer program meld the faces of two celebrities to see what their kids would look like, only the program works to exaggerate the features of each, so that you always have a freakish result.

The news today makes me think that it would be worthwhile melding Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to see if the result looked like W. Because George W. Bush faces the weight of a long Asian land war gone badly wrong, just as Johnson did. And he faces the charges of high-level corruption and illegal wiretapping that dogged Richard Nixon. He has become both"Mah feller Amurcans" Bush and"tricky Georgie." W. has survived all this relatively well, given the dreadful facts of it.

Arthur Greif suggests we just have a California-style referendum in Iraq and ask the Iraqis if they want the US troops to leave within 6 months. He knows that the likely answer is"yes," and suggests that it would give us an honorable way out. The problem is that the Cheney administration does not want an honorable way out, they want petroleum contracts for their Houston cronies.

The history of American political patronage is as old as the nation itself — from George Washington's marginally qualified Federalist Party appointees to George Washington Plunkitt's minions at Tammany Hall to the politically connected federal administrators who were slow to respond when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Yet rarely has an institution offered as explicit a lesson in the spoils system as New Jersey's state medical school, which codified its highly elaborate system of political favoritism in a series of memos, e-mail messages and spreadsheets.