It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Desperate Attempt To Cling To One's Cold War Pathologies Regardless Of Cost (To The Taxpayer Or Foot Soldier)!

THE good news, kids, is that Miller Lite Presents ABC's This Week With George Robert Stephanopoulos, Brought To You By Citgo, the erstwhile This Week, has heard what you're sayin', and dug it, man, and has enshrined two of the younger generation of hip, younger generational interwebnets-savvy youth: David Frum, of newmajority.com--there aren't any spaces, or capital letters, and the "." is pronounced "dot"; it's real flip-your-wig stuff!--and "blogger", which is short for something, Zsa Zsa Arianna Huffington, and boy are her opinions out there! I'm tellin' you. She used to be married to a gay man!

So Youth is Served at the very Covered Walkway to the Portals of the Passenger Elevator to the Mezzanine Floor of the Citaldels of Power. They're from the Internet! That'll stick it to The Man! Not to mention that at long last the Sundays will be acknowledging that the "Conservative" Insider White Male has an opinion too, and it deserves to be heard. So I guess all the kids will stop twigging or twisting or sextaping, or whatever it is they usually do rather than attend church, and "kick back" for a freewheeling hour of talking heads television involving white people from two of the three major sexes debating issues from that morning's New York Times headlines, from perspectives ranging from Still Ambulatory Professional Ass-covering Canadian Wingnut Disasters all the way to Almost Touching the Center.

Ah, but fans of Pseudo-19th Century Tory Global Warming Denial Crypto-Bircherism needn't worry; there's still the G2 Summit. Yesterday's opener:

Geo. Stephanopoulos: George, let's begin with North Korea; that is the news this morning. Clearly the North Koreans seemed to know what they were doing with this timing of, uh, this launch as the President's giving a speech on nonproliferation and...

[Okay, sorry, I wasn't gonna interrupt, but th' fuck is it with this Oooh, Scary Timing! shit? Is it supposed to have a point? Isn't it true that We knew they were planning the test? Isn't it easier to, like, write a speech than launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of Untold Death and Destruction, especially when, as in the case of the North Koreans, there are any number of holds involved while you re-glue, or touch up some spackle, or spray that expanding foam stuff into a hole somewhere? What is the point? That CommieNaziIslamoTerrorists are so bent on world domination that they won't scruple to ruin a President's speech, or disrupt mass transit schedules? It was right before Holy Week, too. Maybe they were trying to screw up Opening Day for Major League Baseball and forgot to convert for the international date line.

And here's something you weren't going to learn on MLPABC'sTWwGRSBtYbC: the South Koreans just had to scrub a test of their missile, which, unlike the Evil, Bloodthirsty, and Famine-Racked Realm of the World's Worst Elvis Impersonator, is, like, totally designed for the peaceable purpose of putting some more badly-needed junk in temporary orbit.]

...the whole action/reaction cycle here seems to house a ritualistic quality to you. North Korea violates UN resolutions and another one is passed.

[Since we've started borking, or whatever the kids call it: I actually thought for a moment there the "ritualistic action/reaction cycle" George Robert was referring to included the comically hysterical overreaction in the United States to the flaccid provocations of a tenth-rate, second-generation little Hitler in bad sunglasses. But no. The "ritualistic reaction" is to pass another toothless UN resolution, right, Mr. Will?]

Geo. Eff Will: Yes, it's surreal; beyond ritualistic. There's nothing like a ballistic missile to take your mind off Wall Street bonuses.

[Shows how much I know. I thought you would still be trying to hide the cynical exploitation of ginned-up threats to distract from the massive failure of your apodictic ideology. Y'know, like you did for the last eight years.]

In 1960, 50 years ago, since when Jack Kennedy...

[Jack?]

was running for President he said in the life of the next Presidency [sic] there will be 10, 15, maybe 20 nuclear powers. As President he said maybe by 1975 there'll be twenty-five.

[Okay, so unlike Will I don't have a quote boy on the payroll; Kennedy, as quoted by Arthur Schlesinger in A Thousand Days, said, in March of 1963, "ten instead of four by 1970"--I'm not sure how many Presidencies that is--and maybe 15 or 20 by 1975. Maybe he said 25 elsewhere. He was, of course, speaking of what might happen without a Non-Proliferation treaty. It might be pointed out that China was not among the four as Kennedy spoke, wouldn't officially join them until almost a year after his death, although we knew they were bound to soon enough.

We might also note that since the NPT was signed in 1968, every new member of the Nuclear Club (non-signators all, except the on-again, off-again North Koreans) has owed the technology, directly or via Pakistan, to the West. Which means:]

Geo. Eff Will: The Non-Proliferation regime has worked until now; and now it's breaking down.

[Just in case you weren't paying attention, or you were but can't believe exactly what you're hearing, this means that NPT, which was opposed at the time by the same Right-wing Pro-Apocalyptic faction which George Eff Will now imagines is cunningly hidden from us by his bowtie, worked, so long as the only one violating it was us, or our surrogates, in defense of large, happy, democratic regimes such as Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, which we had to arm because we armed India, which we hoped would nuke the Chinese for us. But once this cozy little arrangement got away from us (Who could have Known?) it became a crumbling edifice which demonstrates the inherent philosophical failure of that very Head-in-the-Sand Liberal International Do-Gooderism Will's Strangelovian predecessors warned us about forty-plus years ago, just before the period where Will now says it worked. So they were right twice.]

And kids, look, this show is actually funnier than Saturday Night Live, or The Hills, or that singing dachshund on the YouTube. Will was led to point out the fallacy of the whole "Community of Nations" claptrap, which gave Liberal Blogger Eva Arianna Huffington just the opening she had been preparing for in her dreams as she slept through the discussion up to that point:

"But [a Community of Nations] is an aspiration, and ve haff to keep verking towards it, dollink..."

Wait, that's not the funny part. To which Will--that Jimmy Fallon of yours wishes he could be this funny--interrupted to say:

"I would just remind you that when Woodrow Wilson said to Clemenceau..."

I'm tellin' ya, I went into the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee just so I could spew it. It was, by the way, the last peep we heard from Liberal Blogger Magda Arianna Huffington on the subject.

Or, y'know, maybe she was quiet so that her fellow Internet Youthquaker Frum could get his turn to say that, while International Non-Proliferation efforts, like all internationalism in general, was a Liberal Pie-in-the-Sky Pipe Dream of Delusion that could only lead to Unintended Consequences, all of them bad, which was why Liberals support such things in the first place, in the event We did make such a mistake the US would have to be prepared to guarantee the defense of Israel, which, as its long record shows, would be the first to unilaterally destroy the hundreds of nuclear warheads it officially denies having, because of its perfect record of acceding to international norms on this and every other subject.

Or maybe that struck her dumb, which would be understandable, but my take was she didn't need any help.

Yes, within two-point-five minutes of the top of the discussion we had veered from North Korea, speaking of veering, which has the somewhat proven ability to launch ginormous Roman candles out into the Pacific, somewhere, to poor defenseless Israel, which can only respond with US-assisted accuracy to a distance of 4000 miles, to Iran, which can't do any of that, or make its women behave. And yet somehow--you tell me--that's the discussion. The country which responded to the Vast International Communist Global Domination Conspiracy, which was once bristling with hydrogen warheads, particularly when you used our accounting system to tote 'em up, now wets itself in terror because the Herve Villechaize of International Diplomacy, a man who is wholly dependent on the Chinese, launches a board with a nail in it over the ocean. Nobody--certainly not Liberal Blogging Sensation Jolie Arianna Huffington--says Vat th' fuck? let alone "What exactly do you plan to do about it now that, given free rein, your people proved we can't invade a tenth-rate military power with no nuclear weapons and keep our army or our budgets intact?" Nobody. Clemenceau references are too fucking scary, apparently.

Epilogue: The rest of the day's dog cuisine featured the New York Times periodically finding slightly different ways to claim the Entire World was thinking of nothing else beyond imminent trans-Pacific nuclear annihilation, followed by the later announcement that the North Koreans had actually been trying to launch a payload into orbit (O, silly man in sunglasses!), and had Failed Miserably. So I guess things worked out well all the way around; piss your pants in the morning and laugh it off by nightfall. Lil' Kim was now said to be telling his people that the Successful People's Democratic Satellite was now in orbit and broadcasting away. Dear Lord, is there no end to the lies people in Communist countries have to endure from a transparently disingenuous Press?