WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS
Mark Steyn
One of the drawbacks of the concept of “spin” is that it turns political media analysis into a fully-fledged Cold War “wilderness of mirrors”. The phrase comes from T S Eliot, but it was James Jesus Angleton, the spookiest spook of the CIA’s glory days, who applied it to the business of counterintelligence. Angleton reckoned Joe McCarthy was a KGB agent planted in American politics to discredit the cause of anti-Communism. He figured the alleged Sino-Soviet rift was a massive Communist head-fake to sucker the west.
And the problem with thinking like that is that there’s no end to it. At Berlin station in the good old days, if the guy’s telling the truth, that could mean he’s a real defector. If what he’s saying isn’t true, that could mean he’s a KGB-planted fake defector. On the other hand, if the guy’s telling the truth, that could mean he’s a fake defector feeding some true stuff so we won’t spot he’s a fake defector. And, if what he’s saying isn’t true, that could mean he’s a real defector, since every transparently honest fellow is bound to get a few things wrong. On the other other hand, if what he’s saying isn’t true, that could mean he’s a fake defector posing as one of those true defectors who appears as more plausible by getting a few things wrong. On the other other other hand…
An ex-MI6 guy in Britain once told me that in intelligence every fact had a minimum of seven possible meanings. As I recall, at Angleton’s CIA, they figured it had 11 possible meanings. Let’s just say it’s like 7-Eleven: whatever you’re looking for, it’ll be in there somewhere.
I don’t think the Berlin station types would have been impressed by either the Democratic Party or their media interlocutors. The former have turned into wannabe-Angletons, the latter are like CIA neophytes fresh off the bus. For example, the other day, some secret tape recordings of George W Bush fell into the hands of The New York Times and the excitable lads rushed into print with them, and the great herd of America’s mainstream media stampeded along behind. The chaps at the Times were thrilled by these illicit tapes and splashed them over the front page for days on end, even though the clandestine recordings shockingly reveal that the private off-the-record Bush is …exactly the same as the public on-the-record Bush!
But, like some slip of a thing in his first week at spy school, the Times assumed that the very fact that they were secret recordings must mean they were highly damaging. In completely private conversations taped without his knowledge, Bush reveals…
~ “I’ve got a great wife”!!
~ “The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check”!!!
~ “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”!!!!
These and other shocking revelations caused me to fall into a deep sleep, slip off the chair and get a nasty paper-cut as page 27 of the Times ’ top secret scoop nicked my cheek on the way down. I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but when I got to this paragraph I did wonder whether the whole thing wasn’t a massive leg-pull and that Bush must have had to do 27 takes to get through the line without cracking up:
“Told that one conservative supporter was saying Mr. Bush had pledged not to hire gay people, Mr. Bush said sharply: ‘No, what I said was, I wouldn’t fire gays.’”
To paraphrase Daffy Duck, consonant trouble.
The first time I heard George W Bush speak was at the Elks Lodge in Littleton, New Hampshire in 1999, and this is how he answered an interminable question from a very aggressive gay activist who’d traveled over from Vermont: “Hey, we’re all sinners, buddy.”
Yet, five years on, the media are still expending an enormous amount of energy proving that George W Bush is unbeknownst to the world living a double-life exactly like the one he lives in public. In the thin gruel of Kitty Kelley’s attempt to do to the Bushes what she did to Sinatra and Liz Taylor, my favourite shock revelation is this: a couple of years back, President Bush agreed to host the 35th anniversary reunion of his Yale graduating class. One of them, Miss Petra Leilani Akwai, had been a Mister back when the President knew her, and there was much speculation on the potential awkwardness of the encounter. Here’s how it went:
“You might remember me as Peter when we left Yale,” said Petra.
“And now you’ve come back as yourself,” said the President.
That’s classic Bush: straightforward, transparent, very human, and kind of goofily sweet. Yet Kitty Kelley seemed to think it was damaging stuff.
The tragedy of Dan Rather and his fake documents is that, even if they had been true, it would have made no difference. Even the alleged revelation in the Times scoop that Bush had tried marijuana fits the narrative – a wastrel youth who redeemed himself.
By contrast, the narrative to which the left is wedded – that Bush is simultaneously the world’s biggest moron and an evil genius – is one even Angleton’s CIA could never have straightened out. In the same week the Times was publishing its “Bush Is A Christian Who Loves His Wife Shock! See pages 2, 3, 4-9, 12-23 and special unreadable desperate Pulitzer Prize-fishing section you can pull out and toss straight in the trash”, Congressman Maurice Hinchey, a New York Democrat, was telling a Social Security forum that the fake Rathergate documents had been planted by Karl Rove, the ever more sinister Svengali behind the chimp-faced moron. Though everyone else on the planet knew the memos were fake within 23 seconds, Karl cunningly identified the one network news team dumb enough to fall for them.
The moron and his party have now won three elections in a row, and are on course for a fourth in 2006. Or fifth, if you include Iraq, which was supposed to be a shattering humiliation for the failed Bush war. Sixth, if you include Afghanistan. And the way things are going Bush’s way in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, you name it, the moron will have to take his socks off to count his successes. Yet despite that the Democratic Party refuses to engage with him on the battleground of ideas, preferring to press on deeper and deeper into its wilderness of mirrors and the farthest shores of Michael Mooronization.
Hmm. If McCarthy was a KGB agent, you don’t have to be an old Cold Warrior to figure that Congressman Hinchey is an obvious Rove deep-sleeper planted in New York decades ago to make the Democrats look even bigger dopes than CBS News… |
