Non-Conventional Responses

We've already digested the announcement from yesterday that neither Bush nor Cheney will attend their party's convention. They let out something to the effect that they'd be too busy responding to the hurricane to go.

Of course, the exact nature of this response remained a mystery.

Partly to dispel this mystery, the White House web site yesterday published photos of Bush dealing with the crisis. This is some pretty weird shit.

The best photo shows the president striking a stiff pose, holding an antique, twentieth-century telephone with a curly cord in one hand and a large, red folder marked "Classified" in the other. Presumably, this designation of the folder's contents indicates that the administration's response to Hurricane Gustav is a closely-guarded secret. In fact, it's so secret that even the administration itself doesn't know what it is.

Assuming there's something in that folder besides blank sheets of paper or random pages from the recycling basket, the classification might indicate, as Paul Krugman suggests in his column today in the New York Times, that the administration is about to declare a Global War on Weather.

This is just too strange, really. I see stuff like this and any more I can't even recognize the country I'm living in. It's too unfamiliar. But then, we've only been living under this form of government we're experiencing now less than a decade, and we're not used to it yet.

You may have noticed I did not provide a hyperlink for the Krugman column. It was late when I wrote this, and I wanted to go to bed. So if you're one of those people who needs to improve your browsing skills, your assignment for today is to find your own way to Paul Krugman's Monday piece in the New York Times.