A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Thursday, August 11, 2005

George W. Bush, Sociopath

Bush tried to bullshit a grieving mother whose son died in Iraq. Right to her face.

From The O'Reilly Factor:

Kesterson: So actually, you know, it did come about. They put me into a cubicle by myself, took everything away from me. I also came prepared with a letter to give to the president about how I felt about the war and, you know, the loss of my son, my only child for a cause that I thought, you know, was not worthwhile at that point in time.

And so president Bush came marching in, to make a long story short, came marching in to the room, got right in my face, eyeball-to-eyeball, nose-to-nose this close, toe-to-toe and he said, "I'm George Bush, President of the United States, and I understand you have something to say to me privately.' And I said, 'Yes, I do respect the office of the presidency of the United States, but I want to tell you how it feels to lose your only child in a cause that you don't believe in, in an unnecessary war. And, you know, we talked about it from there just like you and I are talking about. [Emphasis added.]

O'Reilly: Was he respectful to you?

Kesterson: Yes, yes was. But he did, you know, come at me a few times with trotting out, 'Delores, do you realize we've been attacked on 9/11?' Who doesn't [realize that]?

The level of disrespect Bush showed Dolores Kesterson is staggering. When he was trying to sell the Iraq war to the international community, he talked about WMDs, about Saddam's aggressive and brutal history, and about the possibility of remaking the countries of the Middle East into stable democracies. He didn't try to connect Iraq with 9/11 because he knew it was false, and no nation would expend money and manpower in support of a lie.

When it was possible he would get called on it, he actually bothered to stick to plausible justifications. When he was alone in a cubicle with a defenseless, utterly devastated, woman, he didn't. After all, what could she do for him? She wasn't worth the trouble. Why should he waste his beautiful mind on her?

He thought he could slide on out of the room with a simple, crude, and deeply dishonest rhetorical question. Did he for a moment consider that she might have tried to make sense of why her only child had died? That she might be in the 90+ percent of the literate population of the world that knew Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11? Did he really believe he could put this one over on her?

I guess so, or it just didn't matter. The leader of the free world had the unfathomable gall to look into the eyes of a grieving mother and lie to her face about why he put her son in mortal danger. That's not glib, shallow, or (most charitably) ignorant. It's sociopathic. The man has no business sharing the society of decent people, much less being the leader of the free world.

posted by David at 8/11/2005 09:09:00 AM ::

Friday, August 05, 2005

Everyone's an Oracle

From The Housing Bubble:

"[Demos research associate] Silva worries that if housing prices flatten out or decline, some newer homeowners who have built up little equity, could find themselves 'upside down', owing more than their houses are worth. And, if interest rates rise, homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages may not be able to keep up higher payments or sell the house for what they paid. Foreclosures could spike and the supply of homes for sale soar. That could send real estate market into a tumble."

"'That's the scenario I'm most afraid of,' said Silva, 'and it's one that few economists acknowledge.'"

(emphasis added)

Dear Economists,

Please stop telling us only what we want to hear and then wondering amongst yourselves why we make so many dumb investment decisions. One of the core principles of your worldview is that market participants have enough information upon which to base their purportedly rational decisions. A lot of that information is supposed to come from the likes of you. If you fail to provide it, then any prognostication you do that assumes rational actors becomes worthless. If you share what you know, then we make better decisions, and you make better predictions. It's win-win.

I realize that a lot of you work for private concerns that would prefer that the average schmuck is ignorant or, better yet, misinformed, about economic conditions. I could get angry with each of you personally, but I realize that somebody's going to do it, and it might as well be you pigs. No hard feelings.

As for the rest of you, only one of you is the Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America, and only a handful more of you are heads of the regional banks. Among your colleagues, it is only they who have the stature to materially and consistently affect the markets with their pronouncements such that they must be purposely gentle and vague with them, lest they upset the delicate balance of the economy.

Compared to them, the rest of you are nobodies (exceptions listed to the left) who seriously need to get over yourselves. Individually, your piddling little publications don't move interest rates a tenth of a basis point or generate $10 worth of consumer spending. Together, however, your silence has allowed millions of people making $50,000 per year believe it makes sense to buy $400,000 houses with interest-only loans in a no-wage-growth environment in which rates are set to skyrocket.

If your kids were in the that situation and wanted to buy that house, you'd spare no effort to talk them out of it. What about the millions of your countrymen who are headed down the greased rail toward bankruptcy? Do you have something against them? Do you hate America?

Please, just do your jobs.

Thank You,
David

posted by David at 8/05/2005 04:41:00 PM ::

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