So today I was having a conversation with my dear wife, who mentioned that we're talking with North Korea again. Isn't that great? And I immediately responded with what I know: that we're not making progress, we're going back to where we were at the start of the Bush administration, only now North Korea actually has nukes. As Josh Marshall puts it:
Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House the White House [sic] got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons -- not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.
I started to explain this as clearly as I could. And she said to me: "kellogg," she said, "I think you're losing your soul."
Now, she's not a non-political person. I guess I'd put her in the new populist Democratic camp: skeptical on free trade gospels, sometimes socially conservative but with a solid leave-me-alone streak, pro-labor, pissed off at Bush for a thousand reasons from Iraq to the abysmal No Child Left Behind.
What she's worried about, I think, is my tendency to see the evil hand of Bush in everything -- even in good things like our late willingness to sit down with the North Koreans. She's an optimist, and would like to see a bit of good in the hiring of Bob Gates. Whereas I'm with the Rude Pundit, wondering:
How fucked do we have to be here in America in order to read something by Seymour Hersh, about nefarious plots, illegal fund streams to al-Qaeda associated groups, and the fomenting of an enormous war in the Middle East, and fuckin' John Negroponte comes across looking like the most honorable man? What twisted trip into a sphincter-like rabbit hole do we have to be on in order to be able to put those words together, that the depraved motherfucker who turned a blind eye to (and ensured funding for) Honduran death squads that plagued Central America back in the Reagan era (known these days to liberals as "Jesus, who'd've thought it could get worse?"), who was at the center of Iran-Contra, would sound, in the screwed up context of the players in Hersh's article, like the good guy? It's not unlike saying that Charle Manson is the most likeable serial killer because at least he surrounded himself with buddies.
Maybe she's right. Maybe I need to take a little solace in the small sanities that come out of people like Gates and Negroponte. Then again, I saw what happened to Colin Powell and, God help him, Tony Blair, and I think -- you people soil everybody you touch. I want no part of you.
The other day I lost my trusted user status because I wasn't posting that much. Truth is, when I post too much -- hell, when I read too much about this administration -- I feel the negative weight of it. It's hard to think in political terms right now without feeling something lost in my own person.
This is not a GBCW. It's not even a plea for my TU status back. It's just a meditation on whether it's possible for me to think reasonably in the current situation and remain who I am.