Since early 2003, I have expected that the Bushies would be brought down by someone within the administration who was nauseated by the lies and the manipulation who would quit in a fit of righteousness. I thought it would be Powell. Or maybe Whitman. Or maybe the Republican Congress would declare Enough! Or the so-called conservative voters would say hey! wtf? Or Perle would say I knew they were cynical and corrupt, I don’t know they were bozos (or Wolfowitz or Bolton or Yoo or Garner or Bremer). Or the so-called conservative commentators would say hey! that’s not very conservative! Or the Main Stream Media would get bored with their he said she said bullshit and say hey! these people are liars!

I was close.

The Bushes weren’t brought down at all. No one quit. No one was righteous. Powell stayed quiet (Whitman whined a little bit as did Perle and Bremer). The Republican Congress didn’t wonder whether the brand might be damaged until the brand was in the toilet and they were no longer the Republican Congress. The so-called conservative voters kept voting for them and so-called conservative commentators kept cheering for them (except Andrew Sullivan). The Main Stream Media still continues with its on the other hand bullshit (although they do try to sneak in the occasional a member of the administration said X but there appears to be some evidence that Not X).

But finally. Finally! Finally, Scott McClellan has had enough. Several years after he was fired, he has fessed up that no, he wasn’t very happy at all. Disgruntled even.

The New Republic takes a humorous run at how his resignation speech might have sounded if he had realized that he was disgruntled at the time.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1, 2005–Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, yesterday became the first senior official to quit in protest over President Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina.

At a hastily assembled press conference, McClellan said that Bush “spent most of the [past] week in a state of denial.

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency,” he continued. “Katrina and the botched federal response to it [will] largely come to define Bush’s second term.”

and

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10, 2002–Hours before a scheduled Congressional vote that would authorize President Bush to use force against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, a top aide to President Bush has criticized his own administration for what he says is a scheme to manipulate the nation into war.

“Over [this past summer],” McClellan said in an interview shortly after his resignation yesterday, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. … In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

In an unusual display of dissent from an ordinarily disciplined administration, McClellan said the president had “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.” He called the effort a “political propaganda campaign.”

as well as

Asked in an interview about the timing of his announcement, just days before the election, McClellan said he wanted to share his opinions now, when voters can act on them. He said he was not the sort of person who would wait years for a book contract before airing dirty laundry.*

and lots more like that at The New Republic.

Of course, those are all actual quotes from Scott McClellan’s book (written years after the opportunity for voters to act on them had passed).

I have two wishes.

1. I wish I had kept all those *political email debates with my friends about the ethics of the Bush administration during the Scott McClellan era.
2. I wish I had a TV so I could watch Jon Stewart.

* Oh! Wait! I did!

Me too!

Try this instead;

http://www.seb.cc/particles/

I finally finished the third in the trilogy and what an odd trilogy it was.

The Golden Compass started out as a straightforward fantasy novel for children borrowing heavily from Christian mythology with some witches and armoured bears for local colour.

The thing about the daemons was a nice touch. Gave a good excuse to direct the inner dialog outward.

Lyra was likable enough and the good versus evil climax was rip-roaring fun and one can never have too much steampunk.

So far so good. On to book two.

That’s where things got a little weird.

For a start, it was very dark with few of the glimpses of beauty from the first book.

But he still told it like a kid’s story as the story got darker and darker and the mythology more baroque. He added layer upon layer of mythology - as though trying to out-Silmarillion Tolkien - and finally lost me. The only constants were Lyra’s mysterious destiny and the wickedness of the magisterium.

The third book was just silly. It was like he had all these leftover mythical scraps from other fantasies and he had to use them all up before they went bad.

The effect was not unlike listening to a small child describe a poorly-remembered dream. Good becomes bad. Bad becomes good. New myths are introduced right to the very end and old ones just fizzle into nothingness.

Did not like.

It might have been yet another case of mis-set expectations. The word on the street was that it was a child’s novel with atheism as its theme but it was the opposite of that. It’s hard to imagine a novel with more supernatural elements.

Even Prince Caspian’s “You should believe in me especially when there is no evidence” was only slightly less biblical.

Re-reading some of the reviews and interviews with Philip Pullman now, I wonder if he - or his agent - was just trying to cash in on the success of The New Atheists.

Makes me wonder what atheist novel would even mean.