1115.org

Was a Secretary of State ever so dissed by the media establishment?

Condi Rice wrote an op-ed piece about Lebanon. And no one would publish it. Not the Wall Street Journal, not the New York Times, not the Financial Times.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. “I kept hearing the same thing: ‘There’s no news in this.’ ” (former State Department director of media affairs Price Floyd) said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership. “It read like a campaign document.”

Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept “telling me to shut up,” he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. “They just wanted us to be Bush automatons.”

Glowing references to the wise leadership of Dear Leader. That would go over well in North Korea today. Would also have gone over very well in Mao Zedong’s China. Stalin’s Russia too, you think? (Talk about axis of evil, huh? The company we keep these days!)

Bush automatons? Those are the guys who leave, the ones whose phrase of choice is “Bush automatons”. The ones who stay are the ones who prefer “loyal Bushies”. It’s all in the rhetoric, folks. Forget the money, just follow the rhetoric.

And that is why the government bureaucracy is now full of brown-nosing ass-lickers and ass-kissers. Not just when it comes to political appointments, but career positions too. That’s the necessary consequence of politicization, on the scale that this administration has practiced it.

It’s supposed to be foolish beyond belief to make economic predictions eighteen months ahead. But I feel fairly safe in predicting that ass-lickers and ass-kissers in government are going to be in excess supply in January 2009. The bottom will fall out of the market, if you’ll pardon the pun. (Nullus added, just to make Matt’s day.)