Fresh Loaf

Last week, I wrote about how individual and official corruption has pushed Nigeria to the brink of collapse. Despite being as dense with natural resources as a Whole Foods store built on top of an Exxon, roughly 80 percent of Nigerians live on less than $2 per day.

Rereading the column yesterday, I had a couple thoughts.

First, I thought, “Wow! If I managed the newspapers in which this column appeared, I’d double the columnist’s pay! Retroactively!”

Second, I thought the concept of corruption could probably use a little more explaining.

The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t experience corruption the way people in poorer countries do. By and large, we aren’t hustled by cops for $100 bills when we get pulled over for speeding. The fire department doesn’t demand tribute before extinguishing your house. And we don’t have politicians in this country who rig our political and economic rules to help moneyed special interests. OK, scratch that last one.

Continue Reading “Don’t Panic: Tell me more about corruption, please.”

(Illustration by Andisheh Nouraee)

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After I fix piracy, I will focus my energy on the most vicious terrorists of all: Canadian geese.

How can America stop Somalia’s sea pirates?

If Obama put me in charge of “Operation Hook-hands Into Plowshares,” here’s what I’d do:

1) First, stop referring to Somalia as a “failed state.” Many Somali pirates are teenage boys. We all know how moody and status-hungry teenagers can be. The low self-esteem associated with living in a failed state is clearly causing them to act out. Instead of calling Somalia failed, how about something nicer, like “differently successful”?

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With just a few pages remaining on our “countdown to a president who can actually pronounce the word ‘nuclear’ and who doesn’t look or act like he sprouted from the egg of a dim-witted chimpanzee fertilized by the irradiated sperm of Roy Rogers” page-a-day calendars, George W. Bush has already given up even pretending he’s president.

Instead, Dubya is in ex-president mode, focusing his energy on legacy-management.

Roughly half the White House home page is now occupied by links to documents that attempt to spin a positive, alternate history of the Bush years.

The most obnoxious is the 40-pager titled, “100 Things You May Not Know About The Bush Presidency.”

In the “every day is opposite day” dream-world from which the document emanates, Bush actually boasts about his economic leadership.

“[S]ix years of uninterrupted economic growth and 52 consecutive months of job growth,” says one bullet point. Conveniently missing are the bits about how he steered the economy into its deepest hole since the Great Depression.

Even more asinine is this bullet-point boast, appearing under the header “Kept America Safe”: “For more than seven years after September 11, 2001, prevented another attack on our homeland.”

Excuse me? Um, George, you were actually president on 9/11. It was the deadliest ever foreign attack on U.S. soil, and unless Wikipedia is lying to me again, the deadliest violent event in the U.S. since the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam.

“We haven’t had an attack while I was President except for that huge one that happened while I was President,” isn’t much of a boast.

It’s a bit like your wife standing up at your 10th wedding anniversary dinner and toasting you with “Honey, I just want you to know I haven’t been unfaithful to you since that weekend seven years ago when I snuck off to Vegas to star in Gangbang Party 14: Under the Milfy Way. Other than that, honey, totally faithful.” (more…)

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