at the risk of becoming a proxy

This post from Balloon Juice struck me as both intelligent and funny, so I acted again like an un-original pass-through, handing over to you my reading list instead of writing something of my own here.

The Bush administration actually isn’t that hard to figure out. They love secrecy because they know that they are breaking the law. Part of that, probably a small part, comes from actual malicious intent but the much larger fraction probably just comes from the fact that they are not good enough at their job to do things right the first time. If you cannot get things right and you have too much self-regard to admit a mistake (that would look weak in front of the terrorists French liberals press jackalopes) then you get the dysfunctional mess that we have now.

If you can't be funny while using the word 'jackalope,' you're just not tryin'.