Unfortunately for the current administration, I have had the displeasure for the past several years to suffer under management in my personal working life that looks and acts suspiciously like that in Washington. Does anyone else recognize a co-worker in the irritating condescension of Condi? The godawful self importance and abrasion of Rumsfeld? Or the general incompetence of ____ (fill in the blank)? (S/He could have been any member of the clueless upper management where I worked.)

My real life experiences of being passed over for promotions in favor of the far less qualified, working with dumbasses in positions of power, and enduring the daily onslaughts of yet more tiresome ignoramuses up the food chain have made me very suspicious of the entire bush group.

I feel I am not alone in this, which is why I believe so many people in America simply tune out of Washington - it doesn't do any good to complain, either at the office or in the voting booth. The cronies, suckups and backbiters continue to get promoted, make more money than God, and get recognized far in excess of their contributions. (Class warfare? Nope. Just the way it is.)

So the next time we hear that some administration wants to run things "like a business" remember how much fun it was to be at the office and have the whole country run like "that" department.

I think you make a very good point about trying to run the Country as a business. This always seems to fail because the Politicans aren't trustworthy or honest enough to ever provide the long term funding required for a stable longterm infrastructure. Look at the state of our bridge systems, power grid highways, New Orleans, Medical Care, drug dependence programs, etc.

In most cases the "Government run like a business" degrades into corruption and influence peddling. The business thing sounds like a good idea but in the end it always fails and then one day the people wake up to see how deteriorated their infrastructure has become.

The problem with the rhetoric of "government run like a business" is that the people who push that notion the most are people who couldn't hack it in real business (Exhibit A: George W. Bush). That's why they went into politics instead.