The Quotable Charles Pierce: On the vestigial and convenient consciences of former Bush Leaguers

I have grown just a touch nauseated over the past couple of years by the tendency of former Bush administration officials to take their vestigial consciences out for a walk now that's far too late to matter a tinker's curse to anyone. The most recent example, of course, is good ol' Tom Ridge, who has a book to peddle and who may still seek to stake out the dwindling element of his party fairly characterized as Not Insane. This week, to the surprise of absolutely no sentient entity on the planet, Ridge admitted that the adminstration he served had jacked around with the comical "Terror Alert" system for political purposes. (All together now, "Unpossible!") Of course, in 2004, when the revelation might have helped swing the election and save us from four more years of incompetence and vandalism, Ridge wasn't half so brave. Before him, we had Lawrence Wilkerson...who came out and talked about what a cosmic, existential bummer it was to have to sit there and listen to Colin Powell sling bullshit at the UN for the purposes of justifying an illegal war of aggression. (And let us not even get started on General Powell his own self, who could have thrown sand in the gears with a single press conference, but chose instead his lifelong default role as a reliable apparatchik.) Wilkerson said this, of course, as the 2006 midterms were gathering speed and it looked as though the country was going to be rendering a fairly harsh judgment on people like, well, him.

---Charles Pierce.  Altercation.  August 21, 2009.