What’s the phrase? “Some men are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. And still others are simply ridiculous hacks from whom no good can ever come.”
Or something like that.
Anyway, it brings me to the subject of Dan Quayle. I just walked home in the rain in the middle of the night and flipped on the TV to see this sorry chump rambling on about how we gotta get Saddam and he’s bad because he’s a terrorist and he’s bad and it’s not like the Gulf War but it’s like back in Desert Storm and yada and we gotta be wise and yada and we looked at the big picture yada …
It was pitiful. I can’t watch him talk without thinking I’m watching a grown man struggling to tread water in a pool that’s only three feet deep.
The peg for all this, I guess, is a recent meeting of something called the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. It’s chaired by the Darth Vader of Republican defense policy hawks, Richard Perle, and it includes, inter alios, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich. They met last week and apparently decided that we need to go after Iraq after Afghanistan.
On the face of it this board sounds a bit like a virtual retirement community for has-been Republicans like Quayle to get together for old time’s sake over the situation room planning maps. But I actually remember a friend of mine (who really knows this stuff) telling me that it was a pretty big deal when Perle got appointed to chair it. So who knows.
Anyway, watching this wretched goof try to string together a few coherent thoughts on international terrorism made me shudder (reshudder?) at the thought that he ever could have been president. Whatever you think of our current president (and, as I’ve said, I’m giving him pretty good marks so far in this crisis) think what sort of jam we’d be in if this floundering bonehead were running the show.
