We know that they're wankers, living in fear of a fantasy world of a pan-Islamic republic stretching from North Africa to Pakistan, due to their fevered hanging-on to their bad-guys-come-from-nation-states, Soviet-era dogma, but lately, certain Bush Administration statements (and those of hangers-on and other useful idiots) have been too ridiculous even for
them.
Follow me under the fold for the reason why.
Interview on NBC's Meet the Press With Tim Russert ( link )
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Crawford, Texas
August 6, 2006
SECRETARY RICE: Yes, and I know Richard well and am very fond of him. I've known him for a long time. But it's short-sighted, extremely short-sighted analysis, and I would think that if people looked back on the history of how things have changed, they will recognize that opportunity very often comes out of crisis. You know, Tim, the Chinese have a character for crisis. It's wei ji, danger and opportunity. I think they have it right. Every crisis has within it danger, but every crisis also has within it opportunity. And this President is determined to seize opportunities to bring about a different kind of Middle East.
When I heard her say this last month, I perked up in my chair. It was an almost verbatim quote from a book by that favorite of right-wingers, Tom Clancy:
The Chinese language was ideographic--Cortez had met his share of Chinese intelligence types as well--and its symbol for "crisis" was a combination of the symbols denoting "danger" and "opportunity". The dualism had struck him the first time he'd heard it, and he'd never forgotten it.
(from page 443 of Clear and Present Danger, by Tom Clancy, Berkley paperback edition, ISBN 0-425-12212-3)
That the Secretary of State feels the need to crib a pithy Tom Clancy quote in a television interview did very little to raise my opinion of her. I wrote it off as a coincidence, but it stuck in my head. So with this past week's furor over the ABC fictional-but-some-parts-of-it-are-nearly-true fauxcumentary, something else jumped out at me today while reading Digby, quoting, of all things, a Hugh Hewitt column:
THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT “The Path to 9/11” centers on one scene where CIA operatives and Northern Alliance irregulars under the leadership of the awe-inspiring Ahmed Shah Massoud have the opportunity to kill bin Laden. They phone NSA chief Sandy Berger for authorization to make the hit. Berger refuses to make the decision and in the scene actually hangs up on the operatives.
Sandy Berger, former President Clinton, and Richard Clarke (and probably the Mormon Tabernacle Choir by this point) have all gone on record stating categorically that no such conversation, situation or decision was ever in the realm of possibility, much less approaching reality, though Thomas Kean has claimed that "(i)t's reasonably accurate".
As we all know, Kean is credited as the film's "co-executive producer", which I translate to mean "richly compensated shill". Literally everything Kean has to say about this is suspect, since he has a vested financial interest in the film's success, both as a propaganda tool and, well, a propaganda tool. "Reasonably accurate" by someone with credibility as compromised as Kean's, could mean something as loose as "Bin Laden exists, and someone at some point in the past someone wanted to shoot him. Also, we know Sandy Berger has used a telephone. Good enough for me--shoot the scene, boys!"
But that's not my main point. What made me sit up, take notice, and write my second Kos diary ever was the striking similarity to this:
"Since I joined the Agency I haven't done very much of that--there have been times when I wished I could have done more of it, 'cause it might have saved a few lives in the long run. I had the head of Abu Nidal in my gunsights, but I never got permission to take the fucker out. Same story with two other people just as bad. It would have been deniable, clean, everything you want, but the lace-panty section at Langley couldn't make up their minds. They told me to see if it was possible, and it's just as dangerous to do that as it is to pull the trigger, but I never got the green light to complete the mission."
(from page 564 of Clear and Present Danger, by Tom Clancy, Berkley paperback edition, ISBN 0-425-12212-3)
In 1989, bin Laden was still one of the CIA's (cough) heroic mujaheddin in Afghanistan, but Abu Nidal's a reasonably good equivalent for the time period. My point is that influential people in our public discourse are pulling fictional events from popular novels and presenting them as reality. From justifying torture by pretending that situations arising from episodes of "24" are possible--no, probable--in the real world, to compositing real people into fictional Tom Clancy scenarios and presenting it as, and I quote, "reasonably accurate", I think it's safe to say these people have totally lost their marbles.