Another fun week for the White House of Usher.
Theater Review – The Missionary Position
Imagine a bright-eyed, sincere religious right attache doing his movement conservative thing in a Republican presidential race. Roger seems genuinely troubled by drinking, swearing and multiple marriages, and if you think this guy doesn’t exist or wouldn’t last five minutes in a real campaign , that’s the point. The play follows Roger through interchangeable hotel rooms with interchangeable maids, played with a chameleon’s gift by a single actress. Roger’s only other contacts seem to be a profane campaign finance chair who lives to torment Roger’s delicate sensibilities, and Katherine Harris circa 2000.
The politics are fun but more incidental than you would expect in a campaign play feeding on current events. The Missionary Position is less a political drama than a tragedy in the classical Greek mold. A well-meaning protagonist (yes, we’re expected to feel sympathetic for the fundie) seems fit for greatness until the inescapable character flaw leads him to gradually destroy everything around him. In the place of a Greek chorus Roger’s well-meaning harassment of (and occasionally, hilariously, harassment by) various hotel maids underlines the danger in meaning too well and thinking too little. The show has a wit that the cast’s chemistry carries well, for example watch out when the pseudonymous Ms. Harris rips into one of her room-filling rants. The startling, funny denouement is itself worth the price of admission.
For what it’s worth, my wife and I enjoyed it far more than a stiff Julius Caesar by the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theater company. Can we agree that the trend of adding contemporary “significance” by throwing modern clothes on historical figures just confuses the narrative? Either rewrite the script so that Brutus’s suit and tie make sense, or bring out the togas so the audience can do the minimal work in figuring out the old-modern allegory. Annoyingly, I spent important dialogue-enjoyment time (some of the acting was quite good) trying to work out whether, if the plotters are neocons and Brutus is Colin Powell (the same actor plays Powell in a companion piece, David Hare’s Stuff Happens), that must mean that Marc Antony is…Qusay Hussein? Harry Reid? My brain hurts. Also, I’m willing to pay a dollar more if you’re willing to paint the set.
/grump.
The Missionary Position plays until May 20 at the City Theater in Pittsburgh.
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Bush Wants Some Changes To FISA
Outrageous, naturally.
[The proposed changes] provide for compelling telecommunications companies and e-mail providers to cooperate with investigations while protecting them from being sued by their subscribers. The legal protection would be applied retroactively to those companies that cooperated with the government after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
I’m sure that the Democratic Congress will get right on that.
Begin The Wolfowitz Death Watch
Sadly, recent events forced me to take out the peg on my shcadenfreud-ometer. Is it 26 or 76? Who knows.
* World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz personally dictated the rule-breaking pay deal that the WB set up for his girlfriend. Heck, this scandal even has sex in it.
* Drum wraps up the bothched ratf*ck aspect of the Army tour extensions as well as anybody.
* Will Rove’s bad email habits put him back in Patrick Fitzgerald’s spotlight?
* The email scandals in general highlight the way that every scandal seems to only lead to newer, more egregiously heinous misbehavior. Why aren’t people talking about the firing of David Iglesias anymore? Because Gonzales and most of his aides lied their asses off and got caught by their own documents. Why aren’t people talking about Gonzales’s serial mendacity? Because the document dump left out staggering numbers of inappropriatelly filed emails. That would be a top story, except that the White House lost five million of its own internal emails over a two year period. Five million.
As grateful as all this makes me for Congress’s new subpoena power, it seems like almost too much. Does anybody seriously think that the next pullled thread won’t uncover something even more heinous? Of course it will. There’s only so much space on page one, which means that scandals that would have crippled any normal administration will be lucky to get a blurb on A16. Exponential increases cannot last forever, but my general epiphenomenal sense tells me that we have plenty of log phase growth to go before peak schadenfreude.
The Greatest Legal Defense Fundraiser In History
If at first you don’t succeed. Some weeks ago I pointed out that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, whose high-priced DC escort service was raided in late 2006, needed funds to mount a proper defense after the feds froze her $500,000 savings. Ms. Palfrey first tried offering her client list to the highest bidder. When the court blocked that move Ms. Palfrey threatened to simply release the list to an unspecified news agency. That way Ms. Palfrey wouldn’t profit from the list directly, but no doubt she would consider changing her mind if a well-heeled client offered to subsidize the defense.
Ms. Palfrey’s plan B must not have paid off, because now we get what can fairly be described as an exquisitely sadistic Plan C. The AP reports that Ms. Palfrey has released exactly…one name. Who he is doesn’t really matter (you can click the link if you really care…perv), but judging by his rank and influence it seems safe to say that this was a warning. To show that she’s serious.
As I see it Ms. Palfrey is going for more or less the same psychological effect as the crime movie staple of shooting one hostage every hour. It seems hard to believe that today’s release will be the only one. Who knows when one’s name will come out? Maybe tomorrow, maybe three months from now. Ms. Palfrey dismissed her court-appointed attorney so she won’t see counsel unless someone either dials up her defense line or (hint for any sweat-stained armpits at the DOJ) unfreezes her bank account. The clients know who they are. She knows who the clients are. Tick. Tick.
Mind you, none of this should be taken to mean that I approve of prostitution, extortion, blackmail or even that this remotely resembles what is actually going through Ms. Palfrey’s mind. Maybe I’m way off and even if I’m right the whole scheme is very, very wrong. But somehow a very damned part of my soul finds this funny as hell.
*** Critical Update! ***
I was unaware that ABC News already has the list. If you really need to find out who’s on the list (perv), tune in to an upcoming episode of 20/20.
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Friday Night Paradox
Coincidence? In the middle of reading Douglas Hofstadter‘s new book, I notice this brain fart from Ed Morrisey (via) and the following occurs to me:
* The only idea so pernicious that its expression threatens America, is the belief that such an idea exists.
Discuss.
Our Government In A Nutshell
Via Drum, a Republican criticizes the current administration:
It’s hard for a program staffed mainly by folks in the industry to impartially conduct oversight of the industry
The scandal du jour involves too much chumminess between universities and the student loan industry, but he could be talking about any regulatory body in today’s government. Any doofus could anticipate that swapping hacks for oversight will lead to dysfunction. I guess we should take it as a good sign that a select few people have learned from experience what common sense should have told them in advance, but I really don’t. You can’t fix the kind of stupid that prevents these people from anticipating the obvious. On some new issue, with some new government, they will do it again.
The point transcends one party or another. George Bush’s party affiliation had nothing to do with why I could tell more or less from day one that his reign would be an unmitigated disaster. I simply had to apply the rule that any time you remove oversight from a system and swap in hacks with an interest that supercedes simply doing the job right, dysfunction follows like water flows downhill. Set your watch by it.
In that vein I think Fester has a salient concern:
[W]e are not in a healthy political environment. This poisoning of the body politic has provoked an immune response so that the emerging dominant coalition is the sane versus the insane. This coalition will be extremely beneficial to the Democratic Party in the short to medium run, but if this is the political discourse for the next half dozen election cycles than the self-correcting and limiting mechanisms of government and governance will be suspended, therefore increasing the probability of Democrats doing really, really, dumb things.
Sure, I’m thrilled to know that the GOP seems dead set on throwing its electoral future down the Iraq hole. Since my policy preferences dovetail with the Democrats almost all of the time I won’t complain if Dems govern until crazy people stop running the Republican party. For me, the major caveat is the crucial role that opposition parties play in the body politic.
It would be silly to pretend that the principles that I describe here apply to one party but not the other. In my view, certain things need to happen in the near future if less hackish Dems don’t want to find ourselves on Tom Maguire’s ledge.
First on my list, the House and Senate Ethics committees need to get off their asses and sanction someone*. Who doesn’t really matter to me. It could be nothing but Democrats for all I care. Set the bar so low that only one in five investigations lead to an actual sanction, if that is what it takes to create a sense that bad acts or smelly innocent acts will bring an invitation to testify in front of Tim Johnson or Stephanie Tubbs Jones. The next president needs to fully reverse the Bush standards of transparency and conflicts of interest in civil service. Working with Congress and a departmental Inspector General looking over your shoulder is a time-consuming pain in the ass, but I can safely say in principle and from recent experience that competent work will not get done any other way.
(*) This might seem insensitive to Sen. Tim Johnson, who is still in therapy recovering from a brain hemmorrhage. Oh well. Isn’t there a way to discipline someone by conference call? Microsoft NetMeeting seems like it should work for that sort of thing.