…and except for the snow…

Rick DeVille @ 44

I was going to say something pithy about Bush talking to himself being the Pres having the ongoing argument with that part of himself that is still Smeagol, and then I realized there probably never was a part of him that was ever Smeagol.

Smeagol *found* the ring that corrupted him. Dubya was born with it.

It’s the silver spoon that was in his mouth when he slithered out..

Can you imagine if everyone was like Dubya? Fire engines wouldn’t show up until the fire started burning itself out, SWAT teams wouldn’t show up until the bank robbers started releasing hostages… and Al Gore would recommend that we wait for the climate to start cooling before taking action on emissions.

… FEMA would wait until hell froze over to help victims of a class 5 hurricain…

No matter how you repackage it…

It’s still the same message….

edit: crap!

While still governor of Texas, in 1998, he sold his stake for $14.9 million. Styled as a “general partner”, he answer phones and threw out baseballs and hobnobbed with the fans. Pretty much the model he’s used for his stint as president.

JT @ 273 – whatever the reality of the situation, they make the most money by creating the impression that peak oil is imminent. Money is everything. These guys don’t care about nations (let alone people).

Having post issues, so hopefully this isn’t a double, but…

I’m sure they can and do exploit future market fears.

But the geopolitical game becomes at least comprehensible in this light… Bumbling, greedy, weak, and short-sighted, rather than stark-raving mad. That’s satisfying to the Occam’s Razor view…

JT @ 273 – whatever the reality of the situation, they make the most money by creating the impression that peak oil is imminent. Money is everything. These guys don’t care about nations (let alone people).

I can’t disagree with that. They may have manufactured some behind-the-scenes panic to justify the biggest profit-taking – not making – in recorded financial history. I’m sure they would if they could, and would regard it as a good thing to do.

But there are substantial reasons to think that peak oil is not just a short-term excuse for back-room gouging.

Were that to be true, then they could both grab the short-term profits and explain their geopolitical bumblings far better than they currently do… More to the point, it explains how they would consider both consumer-gouging AND their imperial ambitions to be patriotic. Even for the openly evil (*cough* *cheney* *cough*), that counts for a lot.

Bluetoe @ 261, just to remind the folks, “Social Darwinism” was neither social nor Darwinian. It was a Gilded Age confection, a pop culture corruption of Darwin’s biology, which claimed to justify ruthless, unrelenting selfishness by the wealthy elite.

If they were wealthy and successful, it must be because they deserved it; like the Bionic Man, they must be “stronger, smarter, faster”. It couldn’t be because they crushed their workers or competitors by using brutal, illegal tactics. It couldn’t be because they bought the legislatures and courts with some money so that they could make a lot more.

German National Socialists understood that dynamic, and hoped to coopt “Social Darwinism” to justify an equally deceptive argument, that their criminal behavior, too, was ordained by nature.

Yup, Randianism before Ayn Rand, though she had to “reinvent” it all herself.