We should all push a donkey cart up a rutted road

Lileks screedy goodness:

But ask Chavez: which killed more people in the Pakistan earthquake – the shrug of the earth, or oligarchy? Kickbacks and corruption are so endemic to unfree societies like Pakistan that government projects might as well be made of saltine crackers and Scotch tape. This isn’t blaming the victim. It’s blaming the victimizers.

The only bright spot: if Pakistan builds its nuclear weapons as good as its poor-people hospitals, they’ll fall apart in a shower of bolts and sparkly isotopes ten yards off the pad. But probably not. Priorities, you know.

If Chavez’ opportunistic eco-twaddle smacks of the sort of religious eschatology you get from Pat Robertson, it should. The pious leftism of the international nomenklatura is a religion. The United States may not be their Great Satan, but it’s the devil they know. The bureaucrats and the EU anointed are the priesthood - and the Nobel peace prize is the means of bestowing sainthood.

Which brings us to its latest recipient: ol’ see-no-evil Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is like giving the Surgeon General the Nobel Price for medicine after bird flu depopulates the North American continent.