On their visits to the stricken region, [Bush] and Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld the Defence Secretary, have given the impression of corporate bosses inspecting damaged plant at a poorly performing subsidiary.
Rupert Cornwell, writing in the Independent, 10 September, 2005
If 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush’s back, Katrina’s put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina – and all the rot and misplaced priorities it’s exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending “intelligent design” as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times.
[Intelligent Design] no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous.
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, writing in yesterday’s Guardian.
My feeling was (and is): You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.
They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”
Will Shipley, founder of Omni, quoted by Quentin.
In Gentle Regrets, he [Roger Scruton] records the occasion Harold Macmillan addressed the Conservative Philosophy Group that Scruton set up in the 1980s with the late Sir Hugh Fraser and Jonathan Aitken, both at the time Tory MPs. Macmillan reached a climax in his speech, holding the attention of the room as he repeated: “It is important to remember… to remember… I have forgotten what I wanted to say.”
From a nice piece by Sholto Byrnes in The Independent. In an hilarious passage, Scruton talks about how
left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.
From a Washington Post profile of Dubya’s nominee for the Supreme Court…
An oft-cited instance of Roberts’s verbal adroitness occurred in a 1993 case. He was trying to convince the court that it was not cruel and unusual punishment for a prison to subject an inmate to exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke. A justice asked if it would be permissible for the prison to subject inmates to asbestos exposure.
It would not, Roberts replied, because “we as a society do not treat exposure to asbestos as a matter of personal preference. When you go to a restaurant, they don’t ask if you want the asbestos section or the non-asbestos section.”
The courtroom erupted in laughter — but Roberts may have been too clever by half. His side lost.
In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.
London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone.
Life is nanotechnology that works.
Rita Colwell, Director, National Science Foundation, quoted in Ray Kurzweil’s new book.
The issue here isn’t one of bad manners — it’s about bad management and bad judgment. Bolton isn’t just a tough guy; he’s a tough guy who apparently used his ire to bludgeon intelligence reports into the shape he sought. It’s one thing to push around your subordinates; it’s quite another to push around the information on which the lives of Americans and American troops depend. The reason Bolton’s nomination strikes so many observers, including me, as so profoundly wrong is that it’s precisely Bolton’s management style — one shared by, and endorsed by, the Vice President’s office — that led to the debacle of American intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.
Scott Rosenberg on the fruitcake Dubya wants to appoint as the US Ambassador to the United Nations
The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Groucho Marx, quoted in this week’s Economist in the course of a thoughtful article on Tony Blair.