Loose Talk

There's something in the news that I just don't get. What is with the reaction to Dick Armitage's supposed threat to the Pakistani intelligence minister after 9/11? You know the threat -- that we'd bomb them back to the stone age (as if they've ever left it) -- and the reason you know it is because it was HUGE news. But why, exactly? There seem to me 2 very obvious reasons, and they are pretty much mutually exclusive:

1. The quote confirms a growing public sense that the Bushies are a bunch of cowboys with an insatiable desire for violence, and a nasty habit of threatening people rather than using sissy diplomacy. This growing public sense is what you and I call a priori knowledge.

2. The quote confirms that the Bushies are on the ball when it comes to terrorism, and they get shit done. I can't elaborate on this point any further, because I find it so very stomach-turning.

Ok, but do you see the problem? 1 & 2 are opposites, and no one will say which might be the reason to report this thing. And, I have to say, the quote so perfectly fits with both 1 & 2 in terms of spanning all of American opinion, that what's surprising is that anyone found the quote surprising. I find it the most natural thing in the world that those assholes would go around telling people we're going to bomb them back to the stone age. What the hell else would you expect? And in that sense, who cares?

But I think there's a reason 3, and that reason 3 is the real reason. Reason 3 is an interesting complex made up of the following facts: Osama bin Laden is probably in Pakistan. Musharraf has made a deal with local tribal leaders that appears to allow them to operate with relative impunity. He has to make this deal because the southern and western regions of Pakistan have become a happy Taliban-Al Qaeda-Jihadist nutfarm. None of this appears likely to stop Pakistan's new jihadis from spreading over into Afghanistan and engaging the infidel there. And then, of course, last week at his stupendously belligerent press conference, Bush explained that we're not going to do anything about this because Pakistan is a sovereign nation and you can't just go bombing sovereign nations.

Yeah, I know. It's so obvious I'm not even going to say it.

Yes, I am. What about Iraq, asshole?!

Ah.

So the point here is that the quote brings into view several layers of flip flopping in our Pakistan policy, and reveals yet again our institutional inability to focus on actual terrorists who really are terrifying and who genuinely spread, you know, the terror. And, as a bonus, the quote also points out several layers of dishonesty in Pakistan's handling of their own internal troubles.

Now, the New York Times got close to linking these ideas in their story on the Musharraf-quoting-his-minister-quoting-Armitage quote, if by "linking" you mean "haphazardly dumping all together in the same story without ever articulating the connections or posing the important questions." But I would just like to say that that's not adequate. If you're going to use up an entire news cycle on a quote this obviously expressive of hypocrisy (not to mention Deadly Testosterone Buildup), you need to explain what's at stake, and what the thing reveals.

As I have just done.