The Corpuscle

I hardly dare start this post, I'm so full of rage. It's exhausting to be a part of The Angry Left. Sometimes I think that's the plan: to so offend rationality that everyone is driven permanently mad and then the people in charge get to take home all of our toys.

I'm in the office early this morning, down here about fifty yards from where the World Trade Center used to be. The boss'll be in soon and if I don't finish this post before he comes in, I fear I'll have to tell him to go eff himself until I get it done. I'd best be brief, but I have to get this out of my system.

You know who Clark Kent Ervin is, right? He was the incredibly effective Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") until the Senate failed to confirm his recess appointment, and the Bush Administration refused to renominate him. It wasn't all the fault of the Republicans -- Idiot Lieberman, ranking minority member on the relevant committee failed to press the issue -- but it was mostly the Republicans. Like so many crap-canned members of the Bush Administration, Ervin's mistake was telling the truth consistently, relentlessly, and without hesitation, in his case about the failures, shortcomings, idiocies and deceptions of the DHS. A blacker mark against your permanent record is difficult to imagine, by the hiring standards of our current government.

Ervin is just the kind of guy we want riding herd on the things that actually matter. The DHS was (and still is) a mess. He said that. And so he had to go. Read all about it.

So Superman's Alter-ego Ervin has a new book out, Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack wherein he details all the ways in which the DHS is utterly failing at its job, and the way in which I'm as much of a fat and juicy target sitting here at my desk as I was on the morning of September 11, 2001.

I heard him interviewed yesterday on the Brian Lehrer Show. Listen all about it. (Note: WNYC is in the middle of a fund drive so there is a little bit of that on the mp3. Wind ahead. Oh, and after you are through listening, give them some damned money.)

All right, okay, I haven't said nearly everything I want to say about this, not by a long shot, but that's enough for now. At least now I can concentrate a little bit on the more mundane details of this life of mine that will probably end, thanks to the incompetence of the DHS, at the hands of a terrorist.

I may not post tomorrow. Assuming New York City doesn't get blown up in the meantime, I've got a dinner party to host on Saturday night and I have a ton of things to do between now and then. We were calling it a "Pot Luck" but I made everybody start calling it a "Pot Karma".

See, cause I don't believe in luck, but I do believe in karma. I have to. How else can I survive these days if I can't believe Bush will someday have to pay for what he's done and what he continues to do to us?