I love all of this short, but sweet editorial in last week's Texas Observer. But I'm especially fond of this succinct little summary of the Scorched Earth Presidency:
Consider all that we’ve lived through in the past few years. We’ve got an administration that lied its way to a never-ending war in Iraq (and a wimpy Congress that went along with it); that talks about promoting democracy around the world as it engages in and outsources torture; that collectively went shoe-shopping as Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. We’ve got a military budget that tops more than $500 billion a year; an economic policy best described as Whatever You Do, Don’t Tax the Super-Rich; and a ratio of CEO to average-worker pay that puts us right up there with countries we snidely refer to as “Banana Republics.” What else? Oh, yes. We’ve got a brand new domestic spy program, can’t forget that. As James Risen, a New York Times reporter and author of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, has written, the Bush presidency “has been the first in modern history in which the Pentagon served as the overwhelming center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy.” In other words, “One of the most lasting and damaging legacies of the Bush administration is the militarization of American intelligence.” (In some circles, that’s what’s known as a golpe de estado or coup d’etat.)
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