Thursday, April 20, 2006
Accounting for the Unaccountable
by Tom Bozzo
Avedon Carol makes an excellent point regarding the shuffling of the White House "policy" deck chairs:
In addition to the highlights in Ken's post, no account of GAO's recent efforts on the side of the angels would be complete without a mention of Walker v. Cheney, the agency's ultimately unsuccessful effort to overturn the rock under which the critters of the administration's energy task force were wriggling.
Avedon Carol makes an excellent point regarding the shuffling of the White House "policy" deck chairs:
We don't actually know what their policies are. We know what they say, but they don't even say one thing consistently, unless it's "tax cuts". But even that's not really true - they claim the tax cuts go largely to ordinary working people, but in fact they go disproportionately to the upper brackets and to corporations - and to unearned income. Indeed, their program actually shifts a larger burden of taxes onto ordinary people. So what they say and what they do are two different things, even in this.The possibility that has to be considered — remember, these are the "Mayberry Machiavellis" we're talking about — is that there are no policies. There may be actions that resemble policies to the general public, but they have no outcomes whose effects outside the electoral process have been calculated. This, I submit, makes seemingly crazy things (sticking with actions with outcomes that appear to be total disasters in shows of strengthiness) a lot easier to understand.
