Went through all comments on today's Sunday Morning Talk thread, feeling truly blessed that Alas and FR members report, so I don't have to watch, the political hacks and media whores.
Gergen hates W because Gergen's raison d'etre is his status as the ultimate "Insider," a status he peddled for money and tv face time, and W has shut him out.
Michael Kelly, in his essay, "Master of the Game," wrote of Gergen, "Every species produces its perfect flower and every culture its perfect moment. In the late Spring of 1993, the perfect flower of the Insider species and the perfect moment of the image culture met in the presidential[Clinton] appointment of David R. Gergen, Washington's circular man.
The career of David Gergen represents the triumph of image. The character of David Gergen represents the apeothis of the Insider.
The two are rolled up in him together, in a shining, seamless roundness whose mirrored surface reveals nothing but the political scene rolling by. In himself Gergen has conflated all the old distinctions.
Over the course of twenty-two years, he has traveled from White House to White House, from government to journalism to punditry....From the Democratic camp to the Republican to the Independent to the Democratic...
So perfectly is he of his time and place and class that he is himself a part of the tribal language. To be Gergenized is to be spun by the velveteen hum of this soothing man's smoothing voice into a state of such vertigo that the sense of what is real disappears into a blur. Nothing is more Gergenized than Gergen himself. The blur is the man. He is his own magic movie, forever revising the reality of himself."
Essay taken from "Things Worth Fighting For," a collection of Kelly's writings published after his death in the early days of the Iraq invasion, in which he participated as an embedded reporter.
Snugs, if you want a straightforward picture of politics and culture in the US, you couldn't go wrong with this book.
Glad to know that your father is up and enjoying the sports.
Peach, how are you enjoying Christopher Hitchens" "Love, Poverty, and War?"
Snugs, one thing the UK exports that is priceless, is the genius of your writers like Hitchens and Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels.)
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I just heard Gergen say to watch the investigation move to the President himself. He actually said "what did he know and when did he know it."
They are just trying to fit the template of the Nixon years on this White House.
It is not going to work! In the same way that Hollywood cannot remake a classic movie very well, they are not going to "remake" the Nixon presidency.
"Gergen hates W because Gergen's raison d'etre is his status as the ultimate "Insider," a status he peddled for money and tv face time, and W has shut him out."
Gergen is America's Talleyrand. He's dangerous because he is adept, among other things.
And yes, in the hyper-simplistic world of modern Democrats, "hating W" is an easy currency to counterfeit...useful for buying your way into their most treasured confidences.
Modern Republicans have no use for Talleyrand's court intrigue, however. Gergen *can't* trick his way into our power circles because our currency involves morals, ethics, principles, and life-long examples of living and working. These are things that are difficult to be faked.
This leaves Gergen completely out of Power...after all, Democrats have no Power. They've lost the House, the Senate, the Presidency, most state governments, most state legislatures...even most registered voters.
When Talleyrand (ooops, Gergen) made his move from HW Bush over to WJ Clinton's team, the Democrats had all of the Power (circa 1993). What Gergen couldn't see was that the morally rudderless Democrats would throw all of that Power away under the Clinton Administration.
...And because he couldn't see that future, he chose poorly...much to our advantage. We would have had difficulty dislodging him from our circles of Power had he not revealed his true nature so many years ago.
Gergen had come close to counterfeiting *our* currency, after all. We won't make that mistake again, though.