The Isle of Disgraced Idealogues
Just saw Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle on This Week, talking about the Iraq non-quagmire, and was not exactly surprised to find that he’s graduated to a brand new level of make-believe neocon quackery. I’m not sure if this is something he’s cooked up on his own, or if this is going to be the new Iraq-hawk line, but apparently the current mess over there is entirely Paul Bremer’s fault, because he has single-handedly managed to turn the “liberation” into an “occupation.”
Sigh. How many different excuses are these guys going to cook up before they just give up and retire to the Isle of Disgraced Ideologues? It’ll be like Gilligan’s Island, except none of the characters will be at all likeable. The cast could maybe break down this way: Douglas Feith as the professor, Richard Perle as Thurston Howell III, Dick Cheney as the Skipper, and Bush, of course, as Gilligan, bumbling around the island, screwing things up, muttering nonsequitors. I’m not sure who would play the girls. Much as I dislike Condi Rice, I would never sentence her to a lifetime of maroonment on an island with these jokers. Maybe we could dress Paul Wolfowitz up in a skirt and call him Ginger.
Ick. Maybe not.
But I digress. Bush floundered into office calling himself the CEO president, a designation he quickly dropped as the Season of Corporate Malfeasance came upon us, but I think it would be instructive to evaluate the performance of the people who have been shaping our foreign policy as they would be evaluated if they worked in the private sector. See how they like being thrown to the lions of capitalist “natural selection”, a fate to which they’ve sentenced so many of our public institutions.
Or maybe the other way around: let’s run a private sector company the way Bush runs the executive branch. Imagine this: I rush into by boss’s office and say that one of our competitors is in the process of writing some software that has the capacity to seek out and destroy our products, wherever they reside on the network, anywhere in the world. And further, that this evil company (we’ll call it Evildoers, Inc) has teamed up with a second company (Evil Ones, LLC) who have launched viruses against our corporate headquarters in the past. That the only way to deal with this threat is to nip it in the bud, to launch a preemptive, full-on frontal assault against them, crippling their infrastructure and destroying their business utterly.
When challenged to prove these wild assertions, I produce a recording of a phone conversation between two housewives in Indiana gossiping about an incident at the local Wal-Mart, where a second-generation Arab woman slipped on a Cosmo that had been left on the floor of the snack aisle and crashed into a display of Doritos, precipitating a massive chip explosion that resolved itself into a guacamole/nacho/cool ranch mushroom cloud that rose above the shelves and caused a minor stampede out of the store. When my boss asks me how this is at all relevant to my claims about Evildoers, Inc, I draw a mushroom cloud on his whiteboard and tap it ominously with a pencil, saying nothing but looking at him very significantly. When he doesn’t respond to this, I say: “This is a slam-dunk.”
Now, needless to say, my boss has more sense than anyone in the current Bush Administration, but let’s, for the moment, pretend he doesn’t. Utterly convinced by my nullity of evidence, he orders a full preemptive strike on the network of Evildoers, Inc, and then further proposes that we sink all of our capital into a hostile takeover of that company. Cooler heads don’t prevail, and we unleash ravening hordes of machine-scrambling code upon the heads of our enemies. The company (owned by a blustering moron who derives most of his income from the dissemination of Viagra spam, and staffed by a horde of pimply-faced Visual-Basic-spewing high school students) goes under instantly, and we move in and take over …
… and discover that (1) there was no plot to decimate our software with installations of their own product because (2) they don’t have a product of their own, and never did because (3) most of what they do is produce spam and underpay their employees because (4) their entire technical inventory consists of three ten-year-old Kaypro computers, equipped with 4-color CGA monitors and 10MB hard drives.
Ok. If I’m not instantly fired at this point, then I probably will be when the disgruntled programmers of Evildoers, Inc, displaced by our attack and suddenly without work, go home and, in the basement of their parents’ homes, transmogrify into angry script kiddies and write thousands of visual basic exploits to bombard our network with Denial of Service attacks, insidious hard-drive clearing worms, and disgusting Inuit blubberporn spam. And if I’m not fired then, I almost certainly will be when my boss discovers that our preemptive strike has turned the entire industry against us, and that, not only will they not help us in our attempts to stabilize and relaunch Evildoers, Inc as an Internet Greeting Card company — called Freedom, Inc — they all hate us and want us to die.
But if I work for Bush, Inc, then I’ll be ok. If I work for Bush, Inc, then my boss will not only not fire me, he will praise me lavishly for my commitment to the company, my years of service, and my general upstandingness as a citizen. I work for Bush, Inc, you see, and so, by definition, I can do no wrong.
Now that’s job security. Or it will be unless the country decides to come to its senses and vote the current management off the island, eight months from now.
Here’s hoping.
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