Call it the Leslie Nielsen effect. Your first attempt at a show-biz career fizzles out and dies, but your failure is so quirky and charming that it wins you a whole second career….
What the Zucker brothers did for actors, the neocons are now doing for politics. In the first six years of the Bush presidency the administration’s ideological nucleus – a tribe of humorless conservative revolutionaries led by Dick Cheney and including the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Elliott Abrams – racked up a startling record in matters of official policy.
From their juking of the case for the Iraq War to their Jacobin-esque purges within the government’s intelligence apparatus to their paranoid and sometimes criminal fragging of political enemies great and minor, the neoconservatives working for George Bush botched virtually every important move they made in the last six years.
And so, despite being catastrophically wrong about everything, the Neocon Revolutionary Guard are still big media gets. Some have earned prestigious academic and NGO appointments. A few are still in office—including Dick Cheney. And one, John Bolton, has been generously rewarded for his stupidity with the Bradley Prize—$250,000 plus some nice words about his having "represented this country with extraordinary principle, clarity, and patriotism."
To paraphrase Louise, the exasperated and horrified black maid in Being There as she witnessed an imbecile's meteoric rise in American politics:
It's for sure a white man's world in America…. No brains at all. Stuffed with rice pudding between th' ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as jackasses. Look at them now! Yes, sir, all you've gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want. Gobbledy-gook!Pretty much.
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