Lately, I’ve been preoccupied by the astonishing skill of the American right-wing to just brazen their way through breathtaking acts of hypocrisy, pandering and reckless irresponsibility. The strategy, it seems, is to never, never, never back down… or, if defeat is inevitable, to make it as costly as possible to their opponents.
(By the way, don’t try that at home, kids, unless you happen to have a massive, integrated, highly-disciplined media machine ready to back you to the hilt.)
That level of audacity appalls me… but I have to be honest, I have the same kind of admiration for its practitioners that I had for Frank Abagnale, Jr. in Catch Me If You Can… except, of course, that his daring and deception worked in the service of his personal neuroses and insecurities, and not, say, EVIL.
John Rogers captures that feeling much more eloquently over at Kung Fu Monkey, as he contemplates the Bush administration’s success in whipping up a furor over Newsweek’s reporting while glossing over their own much more far-reaching deceptions:
That’s … just unspeakably beautiful. It’s brilliant. That’s Lex Luthor brilliant. It’s so magnificently evil, I wish I’d done it, just to be able to say I pulled something like that off. When you manipulate public opinion like that so shamelessly, with such breathless artistry, you should seriously be doing it from inside a giant rampaging robot head. It’s the only context that makes any sense.
