What Is The Corpse Of Zbigniew Brzezinski Doing On My Television?

David Brooks, "The Fragile Community". November 29

SERIOUSLY, what is up with The Newshour's rolodex? I mean, I thought I never threw anything away.

I'm not really sure why I switched over, but there he was, the worst mistake Jimmy Carter ever made, looking, frankly, like someone had shrink-wrapped one of those Reagan masks but sounding as lucid as ever. Though that's setting the bar pretty low.

Yes, what better source to help PBS viewers decide whether Wikileaks is an unprecedented calamity or an unparalleled catastrophe than the man who brought you the Moscow Olympic Boycott, the Mujahideen, and Ronald Reagan?

He's the perfect case study for our present Crisis, by the way: Jimmy Carter's Bay of Pigs, the walking embodiment of the restraints placed on rationality, integrity, and human-heartedness by politics, avarice, and the mentality of the mob, or, put another way, diplomacy.

But we are nothing if not fair around here, so for the opposing viewpoint let's go to the suddenly statist snivelers on the Right:

Far from respecting authority, Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist who believes that all ruling institutions are corrupt and public pronouncements are lies.

And based on nothing more than the incontrovertible evidence of the past two centuries.

The Times has thus erected a series of filters between the 250,000 raw documents that WikiLeaks obtained and complete public exposure. The paper has released only a tiny percentage of the cables. Information that might endanger informants has been redacted. Specific cables have been put into context with broader reporting.

So in other words, it's Old-Fashioned Anarchy vs. Contemporary, "True Press Freedom Lies in Being Government's Handmaiden" Corporate Communications. Twelve rounds for the Heavyweight King of the Shitpile title.

Yet it might be useful to consider one more filter. Consider it the World Order filter. The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted.

Y'know what else it shouldn't be taken for? Gospel.

Lemme just ask a couple questions about this civilization, whose very existence hangs on the ability of some House of Saud fuckhead to be duplicitous in absolute privacy. First, how come all its sacred principles operate in one direction only? Why is there one set of ethics for how people are supposed to relate to governments, and no set of ethics for how governments treat people? Where were you, Mr. Brooks, when my phone company turned over my top secret messages to the government, and when the government forgave it for violating my rights in doing so? Where was Zbegniew Fuckink Brzezinski? Lemme jog your memory: on the other side.

It's an interesting thing about Civilization, by the way: like the Church, the teevee networks, and the operators of off-shore petroleum drilling rigs, it gets to be the arbiter of questions of its own value.

Sure, Dave, we already knew that your side's vaunted respect for the rule of law ends when the martial parade begins. Does history have to be a morality coloring book for schoolboys, too? We're leaking blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan. We went there to fight people we put in power, or armed, or both. We wasted 53,000 American lives in Indochina in a war we consciously sold to the public through misrepresentation. We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, not J. Edgar Hoover Day, and some of us really mean it. We spent hundreds of billions on high-tech gadgets designed to defeat the Soviets twenty years after we knew they were bankrupt. Ask Dr. Brzezinski how word of that never leaked out. Hell, Dave, WWI was in all the papers: 37 million casualties, 7 million civilian deaths, political and economic destruction of Europe, genesis of WWII, and the great Petrie dish of the Spanish flu pandemic, and all directly caused by international diplomacy, without a whistle-blower anywhere around. Somehow a few embarrassing cables aimed at people who ought to be embarrassed all by themselves don't really balance the ledger.

So, y'know, Dave, you'll just have to forgive me if I don't believe that the only thing standing between your iPad and the terrorists who want to smash it to bits is Hillary Clinton's ability to make scabrous cracks about the Chinese, or the government's ability to hide what it's really doing in Pakistan from a public which is disinterested anyway. You'll have to forgive me if I believe the rest of the world looks on this as a minor confirmation of what any sensible and half-informed person already knows in spades, and that, far from it being this colossal hindrance to further Trust, diplomats consider evidence of double dealing and back-stabbing about as shocking as the French considered Bill Clinton's blowjob. And you'll forgive me if next time y'all start blaming State for another in your series of mis-directed, lied-about, and ultimately futile military advertures I don't believe you. Not that I ever have.