Column by Gene Lyons: "So now they tell us. With the Bush administration spiraling into political free fall, conservative elder statesmen have suddenly begun speaking publicly about the regime's manifest failures. Meanwhile, aides whisper to reporters that the president's losing it, pitching temper tantrums, lashing out at junior staffers, and blaming everybody in the White House for his problems except himself.
'This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' a source close to Bush told the New York Daily News. 'This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'
No, I don't reckon it is. Naturally Bush, like Nixon before him, also gives the press a 'big share' of the blame.
Backstairs gossip aside, however, the most powerful indictment of the administration's malign incompetence is coming from former insiders. Col. Larry Wilkerson was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff throughout Bush's first term. A career soldier, he has also served as director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College. In short, he's anything but a fuzzy-minded pacifist.
Last week, Wilkerson gave a speech at the New American Foundation in Washington blaming a secretive 'cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld' for seizing power from an ignorant, intellectually lazy president. They were aided by 'an extremely weak national security adviser' (Condoleezza Rice), who told Bush whatever he wanted to hear to build 'her intimacy with the president' and bolster her career.
It sounds like a comic strip: President Dilbert."

Writing in an Age of Terror
By David Swanson
October 30, 2005
Remarks delivered at National Writers Union conference in Philadelphia, October, 29, 2005, opening forum with Ed Herman, Danny Schechter, and Linn Washington, on "Writing in an Age of Terror."
Obviously, if this really were an age of terror, an age in which we were all terrorized, there would be no writing. You can't write if you're terrorized. I mean, you can, but your writing will have all the clarity of a campaign speech by John Kerry, or all the relevance of the election-year literature produced by the AFL-CIO, which refused to acknowledge that there was a war in Iraq.
Every serious article about U.S. or global politics that pretends there is no war in Iraq is an example of writing in an age of terror. Every article that pretends the war is not a blatant violation of international law and a crime against humanity is an example of writing in an age of terror. But that sort of writing, during other wars, predates the commandment from Bush to feel terrorized.