I can't help but notice how much the current Bush administration is starting to look like the Reagan administration–except Dubya can't read from a teleprompter as well as Uncle Ronnie could. Reagan got lots of sleep; Dubya gets lots of sleep. Reagan delegated details; Dubya delegates details. Reagan used homey charm (and his total cluelessness due to creeping dementia) to hide well-oiled realpolitik; Dubya uses, er, colorful malaprops (and his total cluelessness, cause indeterminate) to do the same.

Reagan cut taxes, then embarked on a massive deficit-bulging military spending spree. Dubya cut taxes, then embarked on a massive deficit-bulging military spending spree.

As the Intifada began, Reagan's administration gave tacit approval to Ariel Sharon's “broken bones” tactics of suppression. As the Intifada restarted, Dubya's administration gave tacit approval to Ariel Sharon's “broken bones” tactics of suppression.

Dig deeper, and does the comparison hold up? Let's see with a matching game:

Let's start with my personal favorite, ATTORNEY GENERAL:

W: John Ashcroft
Trampler of the Constitution.
R: William French Smith (vanilla corporate lawyer), Edwin Meese III (Two words- IRAN-CONTRA). MATCH.

SECRETARY of STATE:
W: Colin Powell
R: Alexander Haig (2 years…out after slight misreading of order of succession), George Schultz– MATCH.

Secretary of Defense:
W: Rumsfeld.
R: Cap Weinberger.–MATCH

Secretary of the Interior
W: Christie Todd Whitman
R: James Watt –well, not necessarily an obvious match, but the way Whitman's getting rolled over….

Get the picture? No wonder 80's nostalgia is picking up.

As I was sitting around waiting for the fickle finger of fate to point the way yesterday, I had a good deal of time to read. I read the Times. I read the Wall Street Journal. And I read about half of Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power–not quite the most subversive thing I could find to take to read in a courthouse, but I had already read David Hilliard's autobiography the last time I got summoned, and Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries the time before that…well, you get the picture. Plus, I had just picked up the latest Noam volume at Atomic Books a week or so ago, so I wanted to break its spine in a bit.

Anyway, jury duty is probably the only major block of relatively uninterrupted reading time I get these days where I don't feel like there's something else I should be doing: working, writing, sleeping, mowing my 250 square feet of urban lawn… and there's nothing better than a good anti-establishment screed to get you in the right frame of mind if you happen to be selected for the average Baltimore trial–young black man, on trial for property theft, arrested with little evidence beyond, say, the word of a police helicopter pilot who identified him from an altitude of 400 feet without the benefit of a stabilized video camera.