From Lileks today:

Part of Beinart’s frustration was Hewitt’s unwillingness to marvel at the feet of the 9/11 Commission’s report. I understand. There are few words that stir the blood of a Beltway wonk like “the Commission has issued its report.” That means that those in the government must now react, importantly, and those in the media must now react as well – dissect, digest, explain to the benighted groundlings what it means, and issue Important Recommendations by way of reasoned editorials aimed at the corridors of power, but more likely received by a schoolteacher in Iowa who photocopies it off and puts it on the bulletin board in the staff lounge with yellow highlight-lines through the better parts.

The commission has issued its report! Mo better, the commission has issued recommendations! And the Washington press corps open their beaks, spindly necks trembling, waiting for the savory worm to be dropped from the blue-ribbon mother bird.

Unless you’ve spent some time in DC you can’t imagine the tremendous self-importance that possesses the people who feed off the government. They’re like people who live in the same town where NASA has a tracking station, and think that it makes them all astronauts. And so it comes to pass that a perfectly reasonable talk show host wants to talk about an out-of-power guy stuffing annotated memos in his garters, and because he doesn’t want to talk about the two tablets handed down by A COMMISSION, he’s a blind hack.

Something I read long ago during the Clinton Administration goes to this. We as a species have evolved understanding that not only good looks will get your DNS sent on, but power does as well. As teens/young adults our crushes were all about looks. As adults they become more about power. Spend any time around anyone with even a little bit of power/fame and you see people who would normally be intelligent, confident people turn into fawning kids with their first crush. Clinton did this exceptionally well. Anyone who met him instantly threw out all judgment and good sense just to be in his presence.

Spend enough time in the Washington area and you'll see an entire population of people with nothing more complicated than a teenage crush on power.

Watched CNN's Judy Woodruff when I was at the gym Thursday PM. She was orgasmic about the 911 report issuance. Asked a dozen people why the Bush administration would not summarily accept all recommendations and pass laws enabling such in the 20 days remaining for this session. That evil Bush, preventing us from being saved by the recommendations' terrorism shield.

Your link to Lileks points back to Transterrestrial.com

We as a species have evolved understanding that not only good looks will get your DNS sent on, but power does as well.

Well there you go, Rand! It wasn't a Zone Alarm, Windows 2000, or network problem all along. You just needed better looks and/or more power!

Sigh... I've been working for VeriSign way too long...

"Asked a dozen people why the Bush administration would not summarily accept all recommendations and pass laws enabling such in the 20 days remaing for this session. That evil Bush, preventing us from being saved by the recommendations' terrorism shield."

ABC evening news had the same message--wondering why Bush would not immediately enact all of the recommendations. Then, for good measure, they suggested that if he did enact all of them, people would ask how come he had not enacted them _already_ but had to wait for the report to come out. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, huh?

But what the reporter failed to recognize was that these are simply recommendations. There is no guarantee that they are the proper ones. And there is no guarantee that they will prevent the next terrorist act.

I watched it again. It was ABC World News Tonight and the reporter was John Cochran. Cochran raised the question of why, if the administration could enact all of the Commission's changes without turning to Congress, it had not already done so. Of course this is an idiotic question, because the report was not released until Thursday and Cochran was asking this question on Friday.

He asked this question of some female spokesperson for the Bush administration. I forget her response, but she really should have tossed this back at him and said "We have to _read_ the report first!"

Note that the people going on about the "Patriot Act" and how it's destroyed our civil liberties correlate nicely with those people who think all these recommendations should be enacted immediately without any discussion or analysis of their consequences. Another example of how there's no rationality in a broad part of the political spectrum these days.