Shrimp and Shrub March 17, 2004February 24, 2017 SHORT RED LOBSTER! Listen. If we’re going to go by Leviticus, then we can’t very well order the shrimp cocktail. Click here. (On this gay marriage thing, Congressman Barney Frank ‘identified the crucial question years ago,’ writes Charles Kaiser in the Advocate, ‘when Congress passed the notorious Defense of Marriage Act. If gay marriage is finally legalized in America, he asked, are married men going to ‘smack themselves on the head and say, ‘Wow, I could have married a man!’?’) (And here’s a thought: what if we made gay marriage voluntary?) W., REMEMBERED ‘At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago,’ writes Professor Yoshi Tsurumi, ‘George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that ‘people are poor because they are lazy.’ He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to ‘free market competition.’ To him, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was ‘socialism.’ Recently, President Bush’s Federal Appeals Court Nominee, California’s Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown, repeated the same broadside at her Senate hearing. She knew that her pronouncement would please President Bush and Karl Rove and their Senators. President Bush and his brain, Karl Rove, are leading a radical revolution of destroying all the democratic political, social, judiciary, and economic institutions that both Democrats and moderate Republicans had built together since Roosevelt’s New Deal.’ ☞ It’s odd that no one from the Alabama National Guard much remembers W., or the nicknames he must have given them. It’s hard to imagine him as the quiet, loner type no one would remember. But be that as it may, he clearly came out of his shell by the time he got to HBS. And thanks to W., it is now a positively grand time to be rich and powerful in America.