Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing…


Cynical Caesars

October
2006

I have a long-standing theory that most of the Great Men who stand for Great Causes don’t actually believe in their great cause per se – rather they give the appearance of belief because it is convenient to do so.

Sometimes, like with most popes for example, it is for ultimately altruistic reasons. Clearly the pope does not believe that God is checking for who is wearing condoms and he doesn’t really believe that unbaptised babies will go to some poorly defined Limbo but if he lets on that some of the wackier doctrines were made up by over-imaginative monks in the dark ages then… where would it end?

In other cases, the great leaders have more malign reasons for their deception. Are Osama or Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il really as crazy as they appear – or are they just adopting impressively crazy personas to achieve some more mischevious end?

David Kuo’s book, Tempting Faith, strikes me as evidence that Bush et al are not so evangelical after all. This article

Here was a conservative Republican, someone who had been on the inside of the president’s signature domestic policy agenda of the first term, leveling damaging accusations of hypocrisy, wide-scale manipulation, and deceit.

at The New Republic suggests that the Dems are unable to capitalize on the revelations in the book because it disproves their theory that the Pubbies want to turn America into a theocracy. Apart from the fact that it does no such thing – in accordance with the Great Men are Cynics Theory, Bush et al are willing to turn America into a theocracy exactly to the extent that enables them to accumulate power – it’s more likely that the Dems are reacting to this story the way the rest of us have reacted to the seemingly continuing stream of stories highlighting corruption, deception and greed. Which is to say, “Duh!”