Lots of Balls in Washington Today. Keep Your Eyes On This One

More evidence today that the GTL, nose in the wind as ever, is sniffing something real and stinky. Hit this and let me know what YOU think...

Before I link n' leave, just a thought. How many "parallel systems" can the Bush administration maintain? For a group who say they hate government (though they seemed to really enjoy it when they owned the whole thing and had carte blanche to line their pockets), they sure do enjoy duplicating systems or even better, supplanting them without actually dismantling them.

Maybe more government is better after all, as long as it doesn't actually help any actual Americans?

Doug Feith, for example, sent all the Iraq intelligence unfit for the grownups at the CIA directly up the stovepipe to the oval office, to be plucked and smoothed, tweaked and whittled to fit the Goebbels-esque "good versus evil" narrative our leaders were terrifying us with back then.

Donald Rumsfeld - remember him, the best secretary of defense ever, as far as W. was concerned? He bypassed the Pentagon, creating a new, admittedly informal, military leadership - again, with its own intel apparatus.

These guys like redundancy, don't they?

Who needs a White House Press Corps when you can have TWO - the real one, with real hack journalists to sleep their investigative duties away, and the other one - populated by slimy shills dredged up from under rocks and paid, people like gay prostitute Jeff Guckert who posed as a reporter lobbing softballs at Bush's adoring press secretaries, or policy "experts" paid to look like reporters and actually make up the news?

Those of you who are taken aback by the duplicity of this clubby bunch of creeps should do what the GTL did after election day, 2000: re-read Orwell's 1984. To me it was a warning about unrestrained corruption, power, and media manipulation. To the president and his friends it was a play book.

And let us not forget another waste of the President's time and our money, the Iraq Study Group, a happy misadventure designed to duplicate the job of both the Executive and Legislative branches, and investigate the facts of the war and come up with recommendations? For all their work, for all their common-sense ideas, they got as thundering a silence from their own patrons in the Oval Office as the policy wonks who preceded them. Tick, tock. Again the meter ran and again the treasury bled.

And now we hear about Bush's decision to un-appoint some of the U.S. Attorneys he originally hired and replace them with newer, better ones? Better in that they don't mind using their awesome (and some would say sacrosanct) power to prosecute political opponents?

W.B. Yeats wrote, "Too long a suffering can make a stone of the heart." Half a century later Bob Dylan sang, "too much of nothing can make a man lose his head."

Lost hearts, heads, fortunes, lives. This is the Bush legacy.

Too much!

Or not enough?

And still we suffer.