Thursday, March 31, 2005

Next Step: Echidne to Head the Metropolitan Opera



Logic would require this. Find the person without any experience or training in the field, make sure that she is totally opposed to the values of the institution, and then nominate her to run it anyway. Tralalah!


Paul Wolfowitz, known worldwide as an architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was approved as the World Bank's new president on Thursday.

His nomination by President Bush was sealed in a unanimous vote by the World Bank's 24 executive directors, the bank confirmed.


Cowards and wimps, all of those executive directors. It's hard to know what to call the person who wrote this Washington Post editorial, discussed on Brad Delong's blog and passed on through Atrios:


People who care about this institution and its mission -- as many of Mr. Wolfowitz's detractors do -- should think carefully before they damage it by attacking its new boss. Criticism of Mr. Wolfowitz's agenda for the bank may be healthy once that agenda emerges. But preemptive condemnation because of the Iraq war is not.


What about preemptive condemnation because he knows as much about international development and its economic theory as I know about the theory of singing? How is he going to be credible in front of a staff where even the office coffee-makers have PhDs in economics? What will his future agenda mean when he doesn't know what he is talking about?

I suffer from ranting fatigue. This is a poor and meager era for anyone who likes to write satire based upon exaggeration. You just can't exaggerate what these guys do. Now pointing out that common sense has flown out of the window is equated with trying to dismantle the World Bank brick by brick. Next I will read that criticizing Wolfowitz's nomination means that I'm in cahoots with Osama bin Laden or that I really, really hate the manufacturers of hair saliva for the smoothing-out of conservative curls.