Welfare reform has left America dangerously undefended against hard times.
The first thing they do is cover your eyes. They make you strip to make sure you’re not carrying anything. They replace your clothes with uniforms that are not clothes at all.
For weeks, conservative commentators and Bush White House defenders have been huffing that the Enron matter is a corporate scandal, not a political controversy–that it is an affair of business sku
The pirate ship has sunk beneath the waves.
The swabs who haven’t gone to wat’ry graves
Row desperately, though all of them now know
Their water and their food are running low.
They row their wretched boats and curse their lot.
Receding in the distance is a yacht
That carries all their officers, who knew
The ship was doomed but didn’t tell the crew.
The officers stand tall. They saw their duty:
Desert the ship by night and take the booty.
One of the old school of the British colonial service, a man with the irresistible name of Sir Penderel Moon, wrote a book about the end of empire and titled it Divide and Quit. At whose expense was this extremely dry joke? Look around the global scene today, and you will find the landscape pitted with the shards of that very policy.
One of the major falsehoods being bandied about by apologists for the Bush Administration is that while Enron may have bankrolled much of the President’s political career it got nothing for those