Today is the release date for The Weed Agency.

The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits is Jim Geraghty’s… comic tale of federal bureaucracy without limits, actually.  The subtitle is a pretty accurate description, all things considered.  You may remember that I interviewed Jim about the book; it’s formally out today, so go buy it.

Moe Lane

PS: Nah, Jim isn’t paying me to shill the book, more’s the pity. But if you buy it via the link I get a little bit of Amazon money, so there you go: that’s where I’m selling out, for a given value of ‘selling out.’

RS Interview: Jim Geraghty on ‘The Weed Agency.’

I had the opportunity to read a review copy of NRO writer Jim Geraghty’s The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits.  My quick review: it’s a funny, fast read that labors under the problem that the most outlandish parts in it – the stuff that sounds most over-the-top – are all things that actually have happened.  It’s not quite a book where you laugh because the alternative is to cry, but you can see that from there.  At any rate: Jim was kind enough to do a phone interview with me on the book.

Download audio here


RS Interview – The Weed Agency.

The Weed Agency comes out on June 3rd: by all means, check it out.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

In the Mail: The Weed Agency.

Jim Geraghty’s first novel (I believe). Halfway through it now, and it’s depressing reading*, because: it’s all true. Worse, the true stuff includes all the horrible things that you’d think that Jim was making up about government bureaucracies. If anything, I think that he’s sugar-coated it in places, simply because you need to ease people into the Awful Truth of how bad it’s gotten.

Book’s out in a couple of weeks; I’ll almost certainly have interviewed Jim about the book before then. By all means, pre-order the book.

Moe Lane

*The tone is chipper, mind you. And yes, chipper AND depressing is an interesting combo.

Quote of the Day, This WILL Become Our Problem Again edition.

And very likely sooner than we would hope, think, and/or certainly want. Jim Geraghty:

We want the world to solve its own problems for a while. The problem is that all this — invasions, wholesale slaughter, ethnic cleansing, missile tests, naval provocations, and raw brutality — is how the world beyond our borders solves its own problems.

‘This’ being, among other things, this (content warning after the fold): Continue reading Quote of the Day, This WILL Become Our Problem Again edition.

QotD, What Do They Have To Engage Them? edition

Jim Geraghty:

There’s some anecdotal evidence that a significant chunk of the Left’s rank-and-file started tuning out shortly after Obama’s second term began, and they’re not re-engaging.

[snip of a clip of Lefty blogger digby doing the digital equivalent of grimly looking at the steadily-decreasing level on the vodka bottle]

A lot of possible reasons for this — scandal disillusionment, the crash after the high of Hope-ium, a public starting to feel like they’ve heard of all of Obama’s rhetorical tropes before, overall exhaustion and boredom with politics as a whole — but this is not a development that the Washington conventional wisdom has even noticed, much less even begin to analyze or explain.

Continue reading QotD, What Do They Have To Engage Them? edition

Jim Geraghty makes a VERY good point on #benghazi.

Alt title: Jim channels ME – God help him – on CNN.

Which is to say: he said pretty much what I would have, assuming of course that anybody was ever insane enough to put me on CNN.

The short version: Jim did some vigorous pushback on the excuse of Oh, well, we’d cover this story except that there’s some random person on the Right pounding the table so we can’t look like loons that far too many people in the media like to use. As Jim put it in his Morning Jolt:
Continue reading Jim Geraghty makes a VERY good point on #benghazi.

QotD, The Antiwar Movement Getting What They Wanted, Good And Hard edition.

I am not in complete agreement with Jim Geraghty over the foreign policy intentions of this President – I think that Barack Obama is black-boxing his natsec responses to match what he thinks Bush would do, and that means that Barack Obama will probably try to intervene in Syria* – but I can recognize the power of this attitude (without sharing it**):

Hey, my Turkish friends so upset by a bloody civil war across the border and a flood of refugees, remember “Valley of the Wolves: Iraq”? Remember when that film suggested that Jewish U.S. army doctors in Iraq were harvesting organs from Iraqi civilians to be sold in Israeli, and that U.S. soldiers use Iraqi children as human shields? Yeah, remember that? Well, go solve your #*%&^ border problems yourself.

Continue reading QotD, The Antiwar Movement Getting What They Wanted, Good And Hard edition.

#rsrh QotD, Would That I Could Say The Same edition.

Because there’s a part of me that envies the man for his ability to get away from all of this sh*t.

“I crawled out of the swamp, and I’m not crawling back in,” [George W Bush] said in a rare interview with the Hoover Institution this year.

(H/T: @jimgeraghty) Goodness knows that Bush deserves retirement and all that; and that his job was eight years’ worth of killing stress. Still, it’d be nice not to have to care about what the hell they’re up to, down there in Dizzy City…

#rsrh Liberal Moveon.org donors… well, moving on.

As usual, Jim Geraghty gets the joke in before I do.  Also, being more of an actual journalist than I am – I am a partisan Republican hack – he broke the story in the first place:

According to documents filed with the FEC, MoveOn.org Political Action raised $9.1 million in contributions from January 2011 to March 31, 2012. In that same period, the group spent $10.5 million, and it has $2.75 million left in cash on hand. With just under five months until Election Day, and additional fundraising efforts ongoing, those totals are certain to increase.

Still, it is a dramatic drop from last cycle and all the preceding cycles except one. By March 31 in the 2010 cycle, MoveOn.org Political Action had raised $18.5 million; by that date in the 2008 cycle, $14 million; in the 2006 cycle, $11.8 million; and in the 2004 cycle, $2.79 million — but that was in the first 15 months of the PAC’s existence.

Wonder what it’ll be in the last 15 months? – Guess we’ll find out.  Soon.