We Don't Need No Badges

Terrific article on the chutzpah of Bloomberg's candidacy from Tom Robbins at the Village Voice: excerpts

Michael Bloomberg thinks he hears America calling. He alone hears this call, but that doesn't matter. Unfortunately for us, he is eager to answer. Fresh from his confab in Oklahoma where he consulted with grizzled wise men, Bloomberg can be expected to announce any day now that he sees no alternative except to bow to this people's draft and place his own name before them on the November ballot. He needs no stinking caucuses to do this, no treading through New Hampshire snows, no forced smiles through endless living-room chats, no stadium rallies only half-filled with supporters, no late-night flights over frozen cornfields, no town-hall meetings that so easily go awry with one little misspoken word. He need engage in none of these tedious democratic exercises. He will simply buy himself a place on the ballot, just as he did here in New York in 2001.

This weekend, Bloomberg sat with David Boren, the former Oklahoma senator who convened the meeting of middle-of-the-road types designed to launch Bloomberg's candidacy. One of Boren's most enduring gifts to America was George Tenet, who served as Boren's chief of staff before going on to become director of the CIA. There, Tenet famously assured George Bush that finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." Also present at the meeting and mentioned as a possible Bloomberg running mate was Sam Nunn, the ex-senator from Georgia who, as head of the Senate's Armed Services Committee, never met a weapons system he didn't want to buy. And then there is Bloomberg's most famous adviser, a man we never seem able to get away from, that old warmonger Henry Kissinger. Kissinger brought us the illegal bombing of Cambodia and the bloody coup in Chile, and here is the wise man on the Iraq War: "Under present conditions, withdrawal is not an option."