Completely out of touch

I've long been bothered by people who just don't take anything seriously if it doesn't actually touch them personally. In other words, if it doesn't have a direct negative effect on them, then it's fine with them. It's this complete lack of empathy for those outside the tribe that distinguishes the neocon magical thinkers and their supporters. David Brooks, someone driftglass contemptuously refers to as Bobo, is a good example of someone with this character flaw. After reading a typical puff piece wherein Bobo recalls what a swell guy Ol' Scooter is, driftglass rips into him.

Standing now among the ruins of his old life and world, vacillating between nostalgia and magical thinking, to read Bobo’s column – “Yes, Those Were the Days” – you would almost not know that there even was a country called Iraq.

Or that we were ensnared their, bleeding to death.

Or that the main architect of that debacle was the leader of the Neocon Koolaid Bottle Gang, our own serial liar and Traitor-In-Chief, Richard Cheney.

Or that the man across from Bobo in the pleasant memory-lunches about which he wistfully rhapsodizes is Dick Cheney’s main henchman, the “canine loyal” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

After describing Libby’s utter opacity when it came to discussing anything in the neighborhood of the facts regarding…anything, Bobo confesses:

[Yet] it was hard not to like the guy — for his intelligence, his loyalty and his meticulous attention to ethical niceties. (At lunch he wouldn’t let me pick up the tab. He’d lay a $20 bill on the table to cover his half.)

And so, like everybody who knows him, I greet his conviction with a profound sense of sadness. You can convince me that Libby is guilty, but I’ll always believe he’s a good man.

[...]

Oh isn’t it quaint now that all the unpleasantness of those days are over? And we can now can laugh and nosh like a fictional Putin and fictional Dubya staring into the shallow waters of each other’s fictional souls, and then repairing a fictional Hermitage’s secret, upstairs stabbin’ cabin to share a phalanyx of fictional Indonesian hookers and a coupla fictional speedballs.

Because what is missing from Bobo’s column is what positively screams out the loudest: namely how little Iraq affects him.

Or, more precisely, how little he will allow it – or any other massive failure of this Administration -- to affect him.

[...]

Bobo tells us that:

Today, the White House culture is less intense. The staff’s relationship to the president has simmered down, from devotion to mere admiration. The president’s failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld hurt White House morale.

[...]

How vomitously After School Special, this sickening idea that this White House has somehow learned some valuable lesson about tough love and now are all Scared Straight and the wiser for it.

And pause for a moment and let the implication of the sentence -- “The president’s failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld hurt White House morale?” – sink in for a moment.

I mean , are you shitting me? This is your journalistic takeaway from the horrorshow that was the reign of Big Don Rummy?

No, Bobo, the correct way to end a sentence that begins “The president’s failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld…” is “…will cost this country more in blood and treasure and reputation for the next generation than anyone can possibly calculate.”

Hell, any sentence that begins with “The president’s failure…” and doesn’t end with tears or rage at the fucksticks who praised and elected and then re-elected this nightmare in the first place is fundamentally dishonest.

No, Bobo, this world of ours and all of the gaping wounds your ilk have inflicted on it do not actually exist within your linty navel. The catastrophes over which this Administration presided were not some pre-game warm-up stretching exercise, and the tragedy of their epic failures is not that it took them so long to begin to show signs of waking from some ideological trance.

The tragedy is that these madmen and degenerates were ever allowed anywhere near the levers of power in the first place.

In other words, you bleating little shit, this

is not a fucking metaphor for anything.


This

is not a Rorschach Test.