What About Bob?

Bob Woodward is a dickhead. (Did I just say that out loud?)

I think it's just super-swell that he's had his come-to-Jesus moment with the reptiles ruining this country. Better late than never, even when there's a financial motive. And it may even lead to Condi Rice's downfall -- though to be fair, she does seem slightly less blatantly incompetent at State than she was as NSA. Knowing this crew, they'll just rotate Fatboy Hastert into Rice's State chair, although in point of fact it may then actually have to be a bench or a bean bag.

I take no comfort in seeing the scales supposedly fall from Booby's astigmatic eyes, nor do I make any assumptions about What This All Means. Woodward really is the court stenographer, in the truest sense -- insofar as he limns the current narratives and facilitates dialogue among the elites, he more or less accurately takes the collective pulse of the functionaries who actually run the place and set meaningful things in motion. These people just rely on folks like Bob to set the terms of debate and keep the plates spinning.

So in that context, I take these momentous "revelations" (Bush is clueless and dogmatic! Rumsfeld is a flaming idiot on an ego trip! Who'da thunk it?!?) to mean that the power brokers -- the "donor" class -- have read the tea leaves and decided that messianic drivel is no longer an operative foreign policy. That it took them six long years to figure this out (or at least do the cost-benefit analysis on it) indicates that, just as youth is wasted on the young, so is a college education wasted on the privileged.

But for some reason, Woodward's utterances are treated with the utmost reverence amongst "legitimate" media scribes, who can only hope to snorkel the right amount and sequence of corporate cock to land that cherry book deal. As far as I can tell, he's just finally getting around to iterating what we already knew, that these people were an unholy trifecta of incompetence, mal-fee-ance, and bad faith.

So fuck that shit. Booby oughta be sharing his royalties with us. I could use some beer money, asshole.