“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Some see George W. Bush and Mao Zedong as cut from the same cloth, though only one was truly stupendous.
Breaking news out of Russellville, Ark. today… A middle school yearbook in this formerly sleepy town included a list of the five worst people of all time. Numbers four and five, respectively, were – you guessed it – George W. Bush and Dick Cheney! How awesome is that?
No one is sure how the list ended up in the yearbook, but the superintendent has vowed to put a stop to such shenanigans in the future. It could have been the teacher supervising the production of said yearbook, or it could have been a student prank. Either way, neither scenario bodes well for public education in The Natural State.
Certainly, Bush and Cheney are horrible human beings by any measurement, but how did Pol Pot get glossed over, or Stalin, or Mao, or even Lady Gaga? I suppose that’s the problem with public education these days. The real monsters tend to get glossed over in favor of the faux monsters… Republicans, conservatives or anyone else who believes in limited government.
So let’s create a new top five list based on who killed the most people through policies they instituted as heads of state:
- Mao Zedong in a landslide, anywhere from 49 million to 170 million (hard to get accurate numbers from totalitarian regimes)
- Josef Stalin, somewhere in the 20-30 million range
- Adolf Hitler, 12 million
- Leopold II of Belgium, 8-10 million in the Congo
- Hideki Tojo, 5 million
Why were the majority of worthy candidates conspicuously absent from the list? Do they receive their due in the classrooms of Russellville or any classroom in the U.S. for that matter? Something tells me they don’t. Most of the Top 20 rule or ruled over communist regimes. You know… The Utopian ideal where you imagine all the people, living life in peace, and so forth.
Some still believe this Utopian brotherhood of man is possible through a benevolent and massive centralized bureaucracy, whilst those who want smaller government are racist Nazis. Apparently these Utopians have forgotten, or purposely forgotten, what happens when you cede responsibility and independence to a small group of people who say they have your best interests in mind while pursuing their best interests. I’m just sayin’…
The world is abuzz with Twitter. It seems like every Tom, Dick, and Ashton has a Twitter account. If one can wade through the narcissistic Twitter wasteland, the service can be helpful. Twitter is great for following real-time events (like the Google crash last week) or to get the first thoughts of journalists/bloggers. There are even fake spacetweets from astronauts. That aside, I come back to the wasteland.
Yesterday President Obama gave speech supposedly about Gitmo that I’d rather not get into at this time. Former Vice President Cheney gave a speech on the same topic shortly after Obama finished. It seems as if both sides of the political spectrum were happy with their guy’s speech (shocking). Evidently, Senator Tom Harkin took a break from creating and supporting bad legislation to give his 2¢ on the issue. I know this because I’m following “Tom Harkin” on Twitter. Well, not really; I’m actually following his name on Twitter.
Every time some person Twitters Tom Harkin’s name I get an email. That’s great when I find out that Harkin calls Cheney “pathetic” for giving a logical speech on Gitmo, but it’s bad when I get an email tweet like this…
Eveofdestructio: sen. Tom Harkin was on and he talked about how obama is following are great constition and Bill of Rights, which cheney threw out .
Really, the words speak for themselves. I guess it was the word constitution that was on the eve of destruction. It still surprises to me that people believe foreign combatants fall under the protection of the United States Constitution. Who knew plotting to blow up innocent civilians and US targets entitles a person to rights as a US citizen? Anyway, that’s a whole separate post in itself. The great world of Twitter debate has begun. Oh, the possibilities are endless.
One of the more forgettable non-scandals during the Bush administration was the whole Valeria Plame affair. The whole investigation hinged on the fact that the Bush administration illegally leaked outed Plame as a CIA agent. It never happened but the resulting investigation led to the prosecution of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief aid Scotter Libby. Libby’s crime was lying to federal prosecutors. The crime had nothing to do with the investigation, but it was still a crime. It appears that Cheney lobbied hard for Bush to offer a full pardon, but Bush resisted.
Several sources confirmed Cheney refused to take no for an answer. “He went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush,” a Cheney defender said. “He was still trying the day before Obama was sworn in.”
After repeatedly telling Cheney his mind was made up, Bush became so exasperated with Cheney’s persistence he told aides he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further.
Say what you want about the Bush administration but there was definitely a stricter adherence to the rule of law than during the Clinton administration. President Clinton broke the same law that Scooter Libby served time for committing. It’s worth remember during the Oscar season when there’s a movie about Nixon that he wasn’t the only one who committed crimes as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Nixon at least had the decency to resign. Less could be said for Clinton and his enormous ego.
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