Paul Krugman put a bee ee ay yootiful column up a few days ago about how the Bush Administration is busily resurrecting practices that were discarded as ineffectual and dangerous all the way back in Medieval Europe (the tax farming reference is explained here, by the way). What’s remarkable about this isn’t so much the knuckleheaded incompetence with which these things are executed or the sheer grasping avarice motivating them - these things are simply expected from the Bushies at this point. Rather, what’s really interesting here is what this reveals about their ultimate goals and motives, and by extension those of the broader conservative movement that nurtured them, brought them to power, and enabled (enables, rather) their every excess not merely willingly, but with what appears to be positive glee.

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