If You Said to Me, Name 25 Million People Who Would Maybe Be President... He Wouldn't Have Been in That Category.

Rock-solid Republican and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein gives his view of George W. Bush:

Susan Mazur: [W]hen we were putting the board together, somebody [Fred Malek, best known for trying to help President Nixon fire Jews who worked for the Labor Department] came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he'll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.

I said well we're not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don't think he adds that much value. We'll put him on the board because - you know - we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us.

We put him on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.

And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things...

Never yet has a grownup looked me in the eye and said, "George W. Bush is qualified to be President of the United States." The most anyone has ever done is to say (around the time of the inauguration), "Look, Brad, he'll be Queen Elizabeth; Colin Powell will be Tony Blair and Paul O'Neill will be Gordon Brown. There are lots of Head-of-State things that George W. Bush will do really well, and the government will be in good hands." But I don't think any grownup would say that or anything like that now.

Back in the 1980s--after Iran-Contra--the grownup Republicans staged an informal coup: Howard Baker became Grand Vizier, responsible for making governmental decisions, while Ronald Reagan sat in the Oval Office without authority to do anything other than approve what Baker recommended, and without sources of information other than those approved by Baker.

Where are the grownup Republicans today? What do they think they are doing?

[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]

I've heard this before but it is a great story and explains why he was unable to answer some very basic questions at the press conference that every one of us has heard in a job interview - he has never had to do a job interview.  comment []11:40:34 PM    

Good and Bad Technologies.

Fred writes about Clay Shirky's comments about good and bad technologies and freedom to innovate:

The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past --- freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.

The narrow sense of freedom, in tech terms, is a freedom to tinker, to prod and poke and break and fix things. Good technologies -- the PC, the internet, HMTL -- enable this. Bad technologies -- cellphones, set-top boxes -- forbid it, in hardware or contract. A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.

And none of this would matter, really, except that in a technologically mediated age, our grand freedoms -- freedom of speech, of association, of the press -- are based on the narrow ones. Wave after wave of world-changing technology like email and the Web and instant messaging and Napster and Kazaa have been made possible because the technological freedoms we enjoy, especially the ones instantiated in the internet.

The internet means you don't have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don't need to be a huge company to change the world. Microsoft gears up the global publicity machine its launch of Windows 98, and at the same time a 19 year old kid procrastinating on his CS homework invents a way to trade MP3 files. Guess which software spread faster, and changed people's lives more?

Simple, and so true!

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

A very accurate description of where we are going. Groups that fail to recognize this will not succeed.  comment []11:24:27 PM    

National Security as a Political Game. NATIONAL SECURITY AS A POLITICAL GAME....Frankly, I don't really have an opinion about whether Jamie Gorelick should resign from the 9/11 panel. After all, she's had a conflict of interest for a long time and so has the commission's executive... [Political Animal]

I do not like the fact that this Administration has taken to heart the use of national security for politcal football. They chose what documents to declassify purely based on partisan politics. How typical.  comment []10:23:23 PM    

The Final Word on the Prose Style of Presidential Briefings. THE FINAL WORD ON THE PROSE STYLE OF PRESIDENTIAL BRIEFINGS....A few days ago I commented that I was surprised the infamous August 6 PDB was so short and badly written. The next day Patrick Belton suggested I was wrong: the... [Political Animal]

So, someone who wrote many PDBs was shocked at the length and the stark terms of this one. Worse and worse.  comment []10:20:53 PM    

James Yee. JAMES YEE....Andrew Sullivan is right to be outraged over the military's conduct in the James Yee case:Very few incidents have made me as angry as the disgraceful, foul and malicious attempt by the U.S. military to accuse Captain James J.... [Political Animal]

Funny how some of these cases just fall apart.  comment []10:18:45 PM    

The Tie Mistake. Not to belabor the obvious, but if the president needed to point to one -- just one -- mistake he'd made since 9-11, he could easily enough have just gone for the tie. How did that happen? Everyone knows --... [Matthew Yglesias]

That tie was something!! How in the world could anyone have allowed him to wear a tie like that on TV. It was really giving off some great rainbow patterns.  comment []12:31:32 AM    

Crash girl found after ten days. A five-year-old survives on dried noodles and drinks after a car crash in California which kills her mother. [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

The guys who found them were repairing a highway barrier. I wonder if it was a barrier that the mother's car went through. If so, why did no one see the car sooner? Why did no one look for them after they were reported missing 10 days ago? This story needs a lot more info.  comment []12:20:18 AM