On No Cure for Cancer, Denis Leary comments:

I was reading an interview with Keith Richards in a magazine and in the interview Keith Richards intimated that kids should not do drugs. Keith Richards! Says that kids should not do drugs! Keith, we can’t do any more drugs because you already fucking did them all, alright? There’s none left! We have to wait ’till you die and smoke your ashes!

Hypocrisy like that tends to put my dick in a knot.  Nonetheless:

• Bush warns against ‘too much’ government in markets (Bloomberg)

OW!

Let me make sure I’m clear on this point.  George W. Bush, the President who put the finishing touches on the CRA’s conversion from quaint window-dressing to Destroyer of Worlds and who, when the shit hit the fan, bugged his eyes way out of his head and orchestrated a five trillion dollar bailout of an increasingly loosely-defined “financial sector” — that George W. Bush — is warning us that:

[...]policy makers should resist the urge to meddle too much in markets as they seek to reverse the financial and economic turmoil now engulfing the world.

“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, but too much,” Bush said. “Our aim should not be more government, it should be smarter government.”

If we stretch the limits of credibility far past their breaking points, we might conclude that Curious George has — as he prepares to leave office — taken a long and sober look over his tenure as President, and is urging world leaders to learn from his mistakes.  I suspect rather that this is another example of “do as I say, not as I do”, but then again I have a nasty and suspicious mind.

(More commentary available on — and a tip of the hat to — Below the Beltway.)

There is, of course, a third possibility.  (I suppose there are many more possibilities, including CIA-controlled Orbital Mind Control Lasers forcing Bush 43 into such obvious contradictions in order to, uh, raise the price of oil by pushing Iran to declare war against the Bavarian Illuminati… but let’s not quibble.)  Despite my best efforts, I still have an occasional knee-jerk tendency to attribute to malice what could be adequately explained by idiocy.  And given how well Dick Cheney’s endorsement of John McCain went over, it strikes me that Bush might be perfectly aware of his politically poisonous touch, and that he really means to bury free markets rather than to praise them.

(Heinlein’s Razor, however, still applies.)

Either way, I wish people would quit blithely talking trash about “free markets” without demonstrating the slightest appreciation of (first) just how un-free modern markets are, and (second) how profoundly they’ve been affected by well-meaning government interference.