I always thought the going rate for a man's soul was well defined by the commodities market:
In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his great age permitted.
"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?"
But surely souls as valuable as David Brooks or Mike Allen must command more.
Simply,
must command more. Is it thirty pieces of silver? No, that would be something they received far earlier in their careers. Granted, neither has much of a reputation, but perhaps water carrier brings more rewards these days.
First, HRH Brooks, he leads,
Administration officials felt compelled to assert a mastery of events they plainly did not possess. Sometimes I'd come away from off-the-record conversations and background briefings feeling my intelligence had been insulted, because even in private, officials would ignore realities that were on newspaper front pages.
Only to take away with the next,
Then, gradually, an internal glasnost evolved. John Negroponte, then our ambassador, forced people in Washington to confront unpleasant truths. But the internal deliberations were not matched by external candor.
There was a vast gap between the eighth-grade level of some public statements and the graduate-school level of private White House conversations. It was about this time that a bewildered newcomer to the Bush administration interrupted an interview to ask me why I thought there was such a big difference between the probing and realistic President Bush he would see in the Oval Office, and the pat and repetitive Bush he would see at press conferences and on TV.
Um, just in case, lets highlight this:
the probing and realistic President Bush he would see in the Oval Office
Yea, right. John Negroponte - aka Mr. Medal of Freedom. Yea, right. W probing and realistic. Unless the probing refers to Abu Ghraig or a left handed wet-willie, I'm not really sure how to tie these two together. But, we most certainly regress and digress: The only way to carry that much water is via an appropriated Exxon Valdez (or maybe the Condi Rice). Is there a single example of Mr. Bush exhibiting this behaviour - I mean prima facie? Here, I'll wait Mr. Brooks...maybe, we'll all wait.
But look, Allen takes another volley in the into the intellectual chasm that <del>X</del>W marks the spot.
ALLEN: You talk to Republicans at Christmas parties, they think [the president] still has the makings of Reagan. There's still great promise in this administration.... If you talk to his friends, the president has not changed. They talk about a sort of Zen-like quality that he has.... They thought they were going to have to buck him up for Christmas. He was fine. He was reading military history, taking comfort in what happened to other commanders in chief who were underestimated in their time.
(politburo nod to Arianna Huffington) Makings of Reagan? (Ante or Post Japanese matress ads?) Zen like quality? Yea, Zen in the same way one of his frat party jello shots was about to transmogrify W into Disraeli. If only he had worn purple on his toga, wisdom - a Zen like wisdom - might have avoided a Mess 'o Potamia cull-de-sac.
But perhaps its another line of reasoning we should pursue. Could it be that we are witnessing a dual prong attack from the vaunted Wingnut Echo Chamber? A small salient, opened by these few, these brave few, to raise the impression of intellect, of contemplation, of just plain ability to walk and chew gum surrounding the Whitehouse? Say it enough times, Washington DC, where all the Republican Congressmen are strong and everyone in the Whitehouse is above average...(thanks to PHC).
www.mightcan.typepad.com
