How Your Government Works:

The Republican ideology that has been the governing factor in American government since 1980 has been to push for less government and more private sector control. The result—a massive world-wide economic collapse, as the private sector is allowed to run amok.

The other side of the coin has been government opacity. We see how the government operates only through a glass darkly, as it were, with only occasional light shed when massive corruption finally comes into focus, such as the story covered in today's New York Times. This is the story of how a mid level government employee "gamed the system" to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, within the national missile defense program. His explanation—he was tired of watching everyone else, from defense contractors to politicians, get rich off of military contracts and realized how easy it would be for him to do so as well.

The Dude explains his administration's policies: "[W]hether they be Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, people have heard the universal call to love a neighbor just like they'd like to be called themselves." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., October 2003.