Ron Paul on Fox News Sunday, Maureen Dowd Rips Dick "Energizer Bunny" Cheney Apart, Greece One Year Hits 60%, and Walmart to the Rescue

Wow, in what has to be Ron Paul's best television interview yet, Chris Wallace gives the Congressman close to 15 minutes to trash FEMA, the Fed, Libya, and espouse the glories of Austrian economics:

It's amazing to hear Chris Wallace mention the likes of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek on national tv.  Paul's appearance should have convinced at least a few of the dedicated neo-cons who watch Fox News regularly of his legitimacy as a presidential candidate.

While Paul did a great job articulating libertarianism on national television, Maureen Dowd, in typical Maureen Dowd fashion, didn't take a hatchet to Dick Cheney's record in the New York Times yesterday, she took a chainsaw with a newly sharpened blade:

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.

But on all the nefarious things that damaged America, Cheney got his way for far too long.

Vice gleefully predicted that his memoir would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” But his book is a bore. He doesn’t even mention how in high school he used to hold the water buckets to douse the fiery batons of his girlfriend Lynne, champion twirler.

At least Rummy’s memoir showed some temperament. And George Tenet’s was the primal scream of a bootlicker caught out.

Cheney takes himself so seriously, flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming (even though he shot his Texas hunting partner in the face) and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies.

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.

The whole article is recommended as Dowd is at her conservative-bashing finest.  It's almost a shame that Cheney has almost become more machine than man and thus may be given a bit a sympathy from Dowd in the future.  I once got into an argument with someone at the Cato Institute on how brilliant Dowd's journalistic prose is.  He vehemently disagreed though he claimed to be a huge Charles Krauthammer fan and I find their style very similar though Dowd is a bit more insulting.  I can only hope to be as a good of a writer as Dowd someday.

Of course to be a great writer, one must practice everyday.  When it comes to fiscal calamities however, doing the same thing over and over again hardly ever yields different results.  Case in point, everyone's favorite democracy Greece, via Mish:

Greece Not Saved

Supposedly "Greece was Saved" on that blue circle when yet another bailout (throwing more good money after bad) was approved.

And to top it all off, check out the one year:

With Finland, Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands demanding more collateral for another bailout, it's only a matter of time before Germany and France do the same.  Don't expect this to stop at Greece either, just wait till Spain and Italy need more money.  As the Eurozone continues its descent into insolvency, it's nice to see a small country like Finland flexing its muscles.

So as Ron Paul mentioned in the Fox News interview, FEMA has a wonderful track record of incompetence.  In defiance of the notion that only government can provide in a disaster, check out this story from NPR:

Forecasters don't expect Hurricane Irene to make landfall until Saturday. But for nearly a week now, big-box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot have been getting ready.
They've deployed hundreds of trucks carrying everything from plywood to Pop-Tarts to stores in the storm's path. It's all possible because these retailers have turned hurricane preparation into a science — one that government emergency agencies have begun to embrace.
At Home Depot's Hurricane Command Center in Atlanta, for example, about 100 associates have been trying to anticipate how Irene will affect its East Coast stores from the Carolinas to New York.
At times like this, the Command Center looks much like NASA Mission Control during a shuttle launch, says Russ Householder, the company's emergency-response captain.

Well would you look at that!  Those evil capitalists and their lust for profit are providing people with food and water in a time of need. How horrible! If only FEMA were around to put an end to such exploitation!

I will end with this great interview of Ayn Rand by Mike Wallace conducted in 1959.  While I am not a big fan of Rand's hatred of charity and religion, she provides a brilliant reputation of Wallace's assertion that roads and hospitals are "free" because the government provides them:

It's amazing such idiotic and naive questions from Wallace on government provided services masqueraded as journalism back then.