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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (4085)	11/15/2004 10:02:02 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

I just think that most people are either too sensible or too busy or too scattered to get caught up in any malevolent plan. I agree. Most people are not going to get caught up in any kind of planning - good or bad. However, it only takes a relatively few to hi-jack our country. I am not putting George W. Bush in that category. He, like a lot of other immediate gratification types, do not think deeply enough about anything. The same could be said about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was not a super intellectual. He was, however, from all indications a very kind hearted person. People like George Will and perhaps twfowler jumped on his bandwagon and tried to use Reagan's trickle down theory to advance their own notions of what our society should look like. However, there is a snowball effect and there are unintended consequences. There are malevolent types (and make no mistakes about it, they are malevolent - as there are malevolent types anywhere in the world) trying to steer this snowball. There is no clear leadership in this group and no one on the super genius level. I don't believe this group will succeed. In fact, I am pretty sure of that. There is no clear leader (visionary). George W. Bush is not a visionary with any real thought out vision. He is merely an immediate gratification type. The problem is they could cause a lot of unintended damage.

To: Lane3 who wrote (4085)	11/18/2004 5:33:50 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

The Appearance of Impropriety by Peter Morgan, Glenn Reynolds I haven't read this book. I don't own it. But the reviews point out the interesting argument it makes. --- Amazon.com One of the longest-lasting residues of Watergate is the vetting industry: a mountain of regulations, committees, consultants, and special prosecutors dedicated to detecting and/or eradicating something called the appearance of impropriety. But for all this effort, it's hardly true that people in government and business are more ethical than they used to be. That disconnection is the point of departure for this book. The problem that Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds address is that the notion that all this energy is directed toward--the appearance of impropriety--is horribly obscure (Is it a conflict of interest, Michael Kinsley once wondered, to have a second child?). It's also subject to political whims and fads and, most important, not all that connected to what we should really be bearing down on: actual impropriety. This is a lively, opinionated read that makes excellent use of learned historical and literary contexts to cast convincing doubt on the current conventions of public morality. Chris Lehmann, In These Times This briskly argued polemic dissects a key paradox that should be obvious to anyoen following the debauchery of our national political life over the past two decades: As ethics bureaucracies (and independent counsels) continue to proliferate, the quality of public morality deteriorates. In an ethics culture governed by appearances rather than substance, no one is ever held clearly accountable for anything. amazon.com