The end of 2008 draws nigh, and it’s time for the last post of the year. But before we, as Robert Burns suggested in 1788, knock back a pint of kindness for auld lang syne, let’s relinguish the past with a parting vitriolic rant aimed about 10 feet above the bow of the departing-none-too-soon lame-duck administration.

Condi Rice: Unapologetic BushCo Flunky

Sunday morning on CBS, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sucked up to Bush, again, saying that despite President Bush’s low approval ratings, people will soon “start to thank this president for what he’s done.”

Bwaahahhhahhahhaa! Get outta here, Condi. You gotta be kidding me. (Note: if this was an attempt by Rice to switch gears and chase a career in stand up comedy, the setup needs a lot more work…a LOT more work.)

Anyway, that was my first reaction — a good laugh at the expense of Dr. Rice who, as National Security Advisor in 2003 warned us all to beware of Iraqi WMD smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds. And the same Dr. Rice who took the job of National Security Advisor, then failed to bone up on national security to the extent that less than a decade after the Philippine police stumbled upon the Bojinka Plot (a plot in which radical Isamic terrorists were caught preparing to blow up 11 airliners en route to the USA — a plot which included crashing a plane into CIA headquarters), Dr. Rice still maintained nobody could have predicted 9/11: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would…try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

It may go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that Condi (I’ll presume it’s ok to call her Condi, since she presumes all Americans are Bush sycophant morons (a nation trying to emulate their leader?)) is trying to conceal her contribution to American history with one last buff and polish on the still-steaming, remarkably vast pile of fecal matter that was the Bush administration.

Am I disappointed in the person I believed was the brightest of the bunch? Yes. Surprised? No.

After all, the world has seen Condi’s brand of historical revisionism before (and it’s only historical revisionism in the sense that ripping out the middle 41 chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a revision.) Perhaps, in the not-so-distant future, in addition to the unwanted Bush presidential library, there will also be FUBAR museums to preserve the awful truth of Bush’s first term for generations yet born, and BOHICA museums that chronicle Bush’s second term and attest to the swift ease with which a country’s defining constitution can be shredded and swept under the rug in broad daylight.

Bush’s Phony Presidential Library

About that unwanted presidential library to be located at SMU…

The price tag? $200-500 million. Bush Library spokesman Dan Bartlett says fundraising has been “very modest.” The modest fundraising may have a lot to do with the choking economy, or it may have a lot to do with a lot of people whose opinions are a lot like another Bartlett…

Bruce Bartlett, the former Republican treasury official who caught hell for his 2006 Bush critique, Impostor, has this to say:

Bush is going to go down as one of the worst presidents in history. A lot of conservatives kept their mouths shut at the time because they didn’t want to be crucified like me.

I thought Bush would have to go a long way to beat Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover but, at the last minute, he pushed the ball across the line…

Whether or not Bush is remembered as the worst president ever (and recent polls suggest that’s how he’ll be remembered — not that Bush ever put any faith in polls, or intelligence briefings, or weather updates, or the scientific reports he let his oil cronies censor), his brand-spanking-new library will, in one way, be a taxpayer-run shrine to BushCo’s habitual secrecy and routine unaccountability: Because of Executive Order 13233, drafted by Alberto Gonzales and signed by Bush on November 1, 2001, the Bush Library will be the first presidential library run by the National Archives in which a former president may censor and even refuse to open documents that the library is designed to archive for the public.

Cheers, BushCo! Don’t let the screen door hit you…

Read More: bush, bush legacy, george w. bush, condoleezza rice, condi, bushco, bush library

…while I upgrade the site software. A lot of stuff may not work, or will be hit and miss for a while.

What’s your favorite Christmas tale? Here are a few of mine:

The Christmas Truce of 1914

On a cold Christmas Eve, at midnight along the trenches of World War I in Belgium, the Germans began singing Silent Night. The British troops responded with their own Christmas carols. Then something remarkable happened: soldiers from both sides ventured into No Man’s Land and began exchanging gifts…

Read more: The Christmas Truce of 1914.

The Christmas Song and Mel Torme

Another favorite Christmas story is how a sweltering July day in the San Fernando Valley in July of 1945 inspired Mel Torme and Bob Wells to pen a holiday classic: The Christmas Song. Although it’s been told many times, many ways…

Read more: The Christmas Song and Mel Torme.

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus

In September of 1897, the eight year old daughter of a Manhattan coroner’s assistant wrote the New York Sun asking if there was really a Santa Claus. Francis Church, a former Civil War corespondent, replied with one of the most touching editorials of all time…

Read more: Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.
Full text of Church’s editorial: Is There a Santa Claus?

Read More: Christmas, Christmas truce, The Christmas Song, Mel Torme, Robert Wells, Francis Church, Santa Claus, Christmas Tales

What happens now that the Big 3 Auto Bailout is dead? Often, a look at our own history can shed light on the future…

Let’s take a look back at the turn of the last century, when Teddy Roosevelt tried — but couldn’t quite convince Congress and taxpayers — to hand a billion dollar bailout to the wagon and horse-drawn carriage industry.

Blacksmiths and Equestrian Real Estate Decimated

Without the bailout, thousands of blacksmiths in Cleveland alone were booted out of their shops, into the streets.

While Teddy Roosevelt tried to convince John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to loan $2 billion to Cleveland’s struggling buggy industry, Rockefeller accused the industry of being short-sighted for too long, and resistant to change:

Everybody saw this coming. Why did not the horse-drawn industry adjust to the changing economic landscape? Because they’re content to be fat, dumb, and happy — resistant to innovation and reluctant to change. If, instead, the bankrupt buggy industry had any responsible leadership, they could have been producing horses that run on gasoline ten years ago!

Without Rockefeller’s support, Roosevelt let the bailout die.

Soon, the demise of horse-drawn carriages rippled through the rest of America. Blacksmiths everywhere closed up shop. Hundreds of thousands of acres of equestrian real estate were sold and turned into parking lots (save for a few counties in Kentucky.)

A Bleak America Without Buggies

In a matter of years, only a few horse-drawn carriage makers remained. With Cleveland’s great buggy assembly lines gone, only a few Amish in Pennsylvania had any horse-drawn vehicles at all. Perhaps a handful of Tennessee Mennonites, too. But, everbody else, my grandparents have told me, was soon left to walking 10 miles in the snow just to get to school.

I’m certain if Teddy Roosevelt could have seen this country’s bleak future without streets filled with horse-drawn buggies, he would have put up a tougher fight to convince the Congress to bailout the wagon and horse-drawn carriage industry. Let’s hope today’s leaders don’t make the same mistake.

Read More: Great Buggy Bailout, Teddy Roosevelt, Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, horseless carriages, buggies, auto bailout, big 3 auto bailout

10. All future expenditures must be approved by new oversight committee chaired by Dick Cheney and a blue ribbon team of private prison inmates.

9. New “Green Homeland” engines to be imported from Haliburton’s Dubai plant, must get less than 10 miles per gallon, must emit exaust containing excess of 10% birth-defect-causing, good-as-nuclear-fallout, radioactive-for-centuries, depleted uranium dust.

8. Richard Wagoner, CEO of GM, must forfeit the $15 million he took home in 2007 and scrub assembly line latrine with a toothbrush once per week until bailout is returned to taxpayers.

Note: toothbrush must be Wagoner’s own, only toothbrush. Whether he actually brushes his teeth during this period is between Wagoner and his dentist.

7. Alan Mulally of Ford, who earns $21 million, must eat every meal in a local charity soup kitchen. He also must put in 20 hours per week at Detroit’s Georgia Street Community garden until all taxpayer moneys are returned.

6. Robert Nardelli of Chrysler, who received a $210 million severance check from Home Depot last year, must make all future visits to Capitol Hill by flying from Detroit to Washington D.C. on an unaltered, off-the-shelf tricycle.

5. Seventy-five percent of the cars GM produces in 2009 must be of the wildly popular electric plug-in EV1 model that was sabatoged in the 1990s by money-hungry management (service-free cars don’t earn service centers any money), Big Oil (a car that doesn’t need gas?!), and the hydrogen fuel cell industry (if cars don’t need viable hydrogen fuel cell technology, we won’t get paid billions to develop one!)

4. The constitutional rights of all auto workers will be suspended such that their phone conversations can be taped, they may be arrested and denied a fair trial, and they may be tortured to elicit a confession…oh, wait, President Bush already suspended those rights!

3. Only get to blow cash on $3 million 30-second Super Bowl ads if all upper management agrees to have fingernails removed with pliers and a blowtorch.

2. Taxpayer moneys will only be used in a strict sense to streamline user-centric networks, enable best-of-breed architectures, grow rich e-services — all while exploiting turn-key metrics and optimising an efficient bandwidth of booze and women and party golf vacations. Trust us. C’mon…TRUSSSSSST us!

And the number one term of the big three auto bailout is…

1. All financial bonuses replaced by “whack any overpaid executive VP with a rubber mallet” points system.

Read More: auto bailout