Bureaucratic & Evolutionary Blarney

The Sunday news programs on TV provide some of the best entertainment in town, especially when bureaucrats or elected officials find it necessary to be unintentionally (supposedly or at least hopefully) disingenuous…with straight faces, at that. Okay, admittedly that’s a euphemistic way of saying they lie through their respective teeth. Or…some of the most weirdly accepted “facts” are put on display and accepted as truth, never mind the outrageousness involved.

State Secretary Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates appeared together on at least two programs on 11 April, both obviously taped in the same room being interviewed by operatives from different TV outlets. They were probably taped within minutes of each other for the respective Sunday morning clambakes. ABC’s Jake Tapper had taped the pair on 09 April and NBC’s David Gregory probably the same day.

Tapper asked both secretaries if they had changed their minds regarding positions they had taken previously with respect to this country’s use of nukes in retaliation to any kind of attack by another power. Both indicated that they had not. The question had to do with the president’s recent announcement that signaled exactly how this country would react to an attack (no nukes, essentially) and constituted a direct change of policy from that of previous administrations, another example of the CHANGE or TRANSFORMATION the president promised would come on line when he was elected.

Tapper then used a tape of a Gates-speech made about a year-and-a-half ago in which the Defense head honcho described the “veiled threat” of nuke-use delivered to Saddam by the Bush administration that would be contingent upon whether or not he used WMD when Iraq was invaded in 2003. Gates appeared at that time to be defending Bush’s position, a graphic example of the need for the nuke option to be in effect. So…the listener either accepts the spin Gates then put forth to explain how he had not changed his mind or simply shakes his head at such obvious duplicity.

Tapper then used a tape of Clinton making a speech during her campaign for the presidency in which she said this: "Presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons. Presidents since the cold war have used nuclear deterrents to keep the peace. I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons." President Obama has done precisely what Clinton said no president should ever do…but she hasn’t changed her mind in supporting Obama’s policy now, exactly the opposite of hers when she was seeking the office. She insulted one’s intelligence.

This is what drives the approval ratings of virtually every individual and institution in Washington down to the low digits…lies/spin wrapped up in bureaucratize designed to “snow” the public. Obama has made a mistake of immense proportions. These bureaucrats know this but instead of simply calling him out (okay, that would mean a firing or resignation) they suck it up and put on a front. Either that, or they’re capable of mind-changes they should admit rather than trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes talking about missiles, new exotic explosives or other stuff having nothing to do with nukes or remotely comparable to them.

In the case of Clinton, one remembers the tale she contrived and used during her campaign about her and her daughter dodging sniper fire in Bosnia in the 90s…something that never happened…not even close. There was a schoolgirl at the end of her race against the snipers holding a bouquet of flowers for her on an airport tarmac…and this was all taped and shown finally to the public. Or there was the time during the campaign during a Senate hearing when she told General Petraeus that one had to “suspend belief” when contemplating his testimony, a nice way of publicly calling a 4-star general a liar to his face and thus exhibiting the proper macho to be prez. Disgusting! But she’s an expert in the field of lying, maybe a requisite for being State Secretary.

There was some comic relief on the eleventh, as well. In the CBS edition of Sixty Minutes, there was a segment about the (gasp and leg-tingling a la Chris Matthews) latest creature in the always evolving chain leading from the slime to the human being. In South Africa, a skull of some sort has been found that the “experts” claim belonged to a boy (humanoid relative?) about nine years old who lived some 1.9 million years ago. Indeed, some other bones have also been found in the same place that the experts say belonged to a 30-year-old woman who would be 1.9 million years old today if she hadn’t succumbed to whatever.

Sixty-minute guru Bob Simon swallowed the whole thing, never showing any doubt whatever that humans evolved from lower forms and that this new skull was absolute proof. The scientist, whose nine-year-old son just happened upon this skull and bones while out in the boonies with his father, couldn’t come within a million years of its age, all “carbon dating” to the contrary notwithstanding. People who make these outrageous claims are in the same camp as the climate-panic gang actually insisting that people are frying the world today, even as the ice floes are on the increase and the earth has been cooling since the 1990s. Go figure. But, it’s great fun.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark