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Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" -- "I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!" |
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Thursday, June 02, 2005Deep ThroatA few thoughts. First, I think what W. Mark Felt did constituted a vital service to our country, regardless of his motivations. However, there's no doubt it is highly ironic that Felt did what he did because he was a J. Edgar Hoover loyalist. If it's true that Felt was motivated to screw Nixon not just out of a sense of duty to his country but out of personal animosity towards the president, then what the affair comes down to is this: Felt's loyalty towards one all-time American scumbag (Hoover) led him to bring down another all-time American scumbag. Do we all agree that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of America's greatest heroes? Well, Hoover was the man who wiretapped him, who tried to ruin him, to drive him insane, to break up his marriage, etc. Robert Novak - who I am now convinced is a sociopath* - called Felt one of Hoover's greatest "toadies" in a clip aired last night on the Daily Show. Wait a second. Mr. Novak, are you telling me you disapprove of Jedgar? That's surprising, to put it mildly. Thought he was right up your alley. Another scum who was making the rounds last night was G. Gordon Liddy, who of course went to prison for orchestrating the Watergate break-in and who has now been fully rehabilitated in the mainstream media, just like Oliver North. Jon Stewart last night made plain the absurdity of any television news program's asking Liddy to pontificate on the Felt revelation, but let me just add one thing. Liddy was quoted as saying Felt is a "criminal" and a traitor, etc. Did Felt break the rules of his office? Yes. Did he commit any crimes? Maybe. But here's the difference: G. Gordon Liddy is not just a convicted criminal. He was caught in the act of criminally subverted our democracy. Felt went above the law on behalf of that democracy, in order to restore it. I mean, is anyone arguing that Nixon didn't deserve to be brought down? Besides Pat Buchanan and Monica Crowley and her insane far-right ilk? Okay, fine then. And aren't today's conservatives rather blase about breaking the law in the name of a just cause? Who besides conservatives, after all, is dismissing the revelations from Guantanamo (and Abu Ghraib and Downing Street ...) with a shrug that says "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs?" It's just one more instance of logical inconsistency/outright mendacity from the right. As far as Bob Woodward goes, his story in the Post today reveals that he already knew Felt quite well before the Watergate story broke, which makes his access to the number two man at the FBI and his reporting in general both more and less impressive. On the one hand, even before his career as a journalist began, Woodward had a knack or simple inclination to schmooze and network. And once the story broke, he was dogged in getting Felt to talk about it. On the other hand, it makes it a lot easier to report a story like Watergate when you have a source like this in your cupboard already, and if Woodward hadn't been such a gadfly/suck-up before he became a reporter, he never would have been able to go to print with some of his and Berstein's revelations. *My reason for thinking this is as follows: Novak does not hesitate to cast aspersions at others, even when it is public knowledge that he is morally compromised. In other words, he doesn't appear to have a conscience. We all know about Valerie Plame. More recently, he published internal emails from The New York Times to condemn them for seeking out a Republican official to get him to write an Op-Ed condemning the Iraq war. Well, the features editor of The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan, was my adjunct professor in a national affairs class at Columbia this past semester, and I can tell you that it is common practice for editors to seek out prominent officials to write columns that follow basically agreed-upon lines. The editorial page, though it should try to present a diverse array of opinions, has its political positions and has every right to publish what it sees fit. The editors have no obligation to give a government official carte blanche to write about whatever s/he sees fit to write about. Soliticiting opinions in such a manner is both ethically sound and a common practice, as Novak must know. What crosses a line of decorum is using another organization's internal memos to score cheap points that the writer has every reason to understand are misleading. .: posted by hornswaggler 2:01 PM| |
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