THIS MODERN WORLD

Today is Dennis Perrin’s birthday, and he’s feeling wistful:

While watching “The West Wing” the other night, I caught the episodes where the Ann Coulterish blonde reactionary is invited to join the White House legal team, and her struggles to be taken seriously by the liberals who staff it, when not weathering their unveiled contempt. Of all of Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasies, this one actually rang true for me, though, as usual, it’s the über-good liberals of the “Wing” who ultimately embrace their ideological opposite, showing us once again just how unflinchingly loyal they are to their inclusive values. Sorkin can’t pass up angelic displays like that. And when the faux-Coulter informs her rightwing friends that her new liberal co-workers are “patriots”? Oohh. The chill, the spinal chill . . . what better or purer endorsement?

All that heavenly imagery and rhetoric aside, I did connect to this storyline, simply because I experienced something like it, though at a more mundane level.

In the Summer of ’92, I was hired as the Managing Editor for New York Perspectives…

The rest of the story, involving the political and personal evolution of a once-hardcore Reaganite, and his early death, is here.

There’s a pretty good story in the New York Times today about Luis Posada Carriles. Posada helped plan the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in 1976, killing all 73 people aboard. Posada snuck into the U.S. last year, and the Bush administration is looking for some nice country for him to go to while trying very hard to make sure he’s never prosecuted for, you know, terrorism. Lots of people are mad about this:

Roseanne Nenninger Persaud, whose 19-year-old brother, Raymond, was one of the passengers who perished, recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urging him to brand Mr. Posada a terrorist.

“It feels like a double standard,” Ms. Nenninger, who was born in Guyana but has since become an American citizen, said in a telephone interview from New York. “He should be treated like bin Laden. If this were a plane full of Americans, it would have been a different story.”

But that’s where Ms. Nenniger is completely wrong. If he did it right, Posada probably could have killed 73 Americans with about the same reaction.

It’s not that the U.S. government wants us dead. You can’t even say, exactly, that they’re indifferent. Rather, it’s that if you made a list of their top 100 priorities, whether we live or die would be about #96.

So if Posada had blown up a plane with 73 Americans aboard, and it played into one of the U.S. government’s higher priorities, then there would be such loud weeping and wailing the heavens would shake. The president would lay a wreath at the grave of each and every one, the New York Times would publish op-eds from relatives demanding JUSTICE. Etc.

By contrast, if Posada had blown up a plane with 73 Americans aboard, but it couldn’t be used to advance one of the U.S. government’s higher priorities—and particularly if it actually conflicted with one of the government’s higher priorities—it wouldn’t be a problem. There would be no wreath-laying, no NY Times op-eds. In fact, by now it would be just as forgotten by most Americans as the actual Cubana Flight 455.

Think I’m kidding? Well, foreigners are already welcome to run over Americans with U.S.-made bulldozers.

They’re also welcome to torture and murder Harvard graduates.

And it’s no problem if they want to kill Americans on the streets of Washington, D.C.

The only thing that matters is whether you kill Americans in a way that provides a pretext for other things the government wants to do. If so, then it’s THE GREATEST CRIME EVER COMMITTED. But otherwise, from the U.S. government’s perspective, killing Americans is A-OK.

Something a little more lighthearted as we hit another Friday, because really, every week is a tough week to be a liberal these days. I think Greg may have started a tradition last week.

(Some context here.)

… and here’s the poster.

I want one.

This is from Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy by William Greider. It was published in 1992:

The contemporary Republican party seems brilliantly suited to the modern age, for it has perfected the art of maintaining political power in the midst of democratic decay…

As men of commerce, Republicans naturally understood marketing better than Democrats, and they applied what they knew about selling products to politics…

The conduct of contemporary electoral politics is like what would happen if an automobile company decided to fire its engineers and let the advertising guys design the new model. The car they package might sell. It just wouldn’t run very well.

Greg is absolutely correct, the Republicans and their sad little sycophants are completely tone deaf on the Foley scandal. I caught a bit of Hannity’s show yesterday, during which a caller who seemed generally sympathetic to the conservative world view tried to explain to Hannity that pedophilia is not a Republican value. Hannity continued to defend Hastert, like the good little soldier he is, continually reiterating yesterday’s talking points — that Hastert never saw the more explicit IMs, never even saw the emails — all he knew was that Foley was sending “overly friendly” emails to a page whose family was disturbed by this and asked him to stop. The caller tried to point out that knowledge of a fifty-something congressman sending “overly friendly” emails to a teenager should have been all Hastert needed to know, but Hannity was having none of it. I just don’t see it and hey, what about this unrelated thing a Democrat did once? Yadda yadda yadda.

It’s really quite astonishing, that they think they can win this one with arguments like that. That they imagine parents across America will say to themselves, heck, what’s the big deal about an overly friendly email? Of course, I’ve certainly been astonished in the past, by the things they can apparently get away with. But when it comes to something so basic as an older man in a position of authority who’s supposed to be protecting teenagers but is instead hitting up on them, I find it hard to believe that most people are going to be swayed by a nitpicky little argument about the difference between instant messages and email.

Purely from a strategic standpoint, if ever there was a time to just toss in the towel and admit your guys fucked up, this is certainly it.