The GOP vs. Nepotism? By Timothy Noah, Slate

[fabius]

The GOP vs. Nepotism?
The White House leakers didn't grasp that, to conservatives, "nepotism" is no longer a dirty word.
By Timothy Noah

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089156/

Posted Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 5:25 PM PT


At the heart of the Valerie Plame affair lies an unexamined mystery. What, precisely, did the White House's two phantom leakers think they were accomplishing by telling Robert Novak that their nemesis, Joseph C. Wilson IV, was married to a Central Intelligence Agency specialist on "weapons of mass destruction" who'd recommended that the CIA send Wilson to Niger to check out allegations that Iraq had purchased uranium there? ..."Clearly," said the official, "it was meant purely and simply for revenge."

snip

More likely, Chatterbox thinks, is that the White House leakers (let's call them WHLs) were trying to expose Wilson as a flake by revealing that he got the Niger assignment through nepotism. To a certain mind-set, the notion that a man would depend on his wife to find work for him would be an unspeakable humiliation. Did Norman Maine let Esther Blodgett use her influence to get him one more movie role? Hell, no! He kept his dignity and marched into the sea. (Chatterbox should here point out that Novak reported in his original column that the CIA denied that Plame suggested Wilson for the job; she merely passed along the CIA's invitation. The WHLs apparently believed otherwise.)

If the WHLs were crying "nepotism," they made the additional mistake of being out of touch with the newest conservative thinking about nepotism, as laid out by Bellow (a self-described neoconservative and the son of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow) in his widely praised book. Nepotism, Bellow argues, is by and large good, or at least inevitable. It strengthens family ties, propels the creation of wealth, and provides a necessary check on the barbarities of unchecked meritocracy. Can't those baboons in the Bush White House read?

more...

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089156/

[Bake]

1. barbarities of unchecked meritocracy??

That just speaks VOLUMES!!

Bake

[tom_paine]

2. Of course, they believe in nepotism and breeding...

The Busheviks are Global Aristocrats, not Americans (they have committed too much treason as a family, from the financing of Hitler to the Smedly Butler Coup against FDR to Watergate, the October Surprise and Iran-Contra, culminating iwth the attempted and Bloodless Coups of the last years of the 20th Century).

They do not believe in the American ideals of the Old Republic. They support breeding over merit every time.

And isn't our Chimply Emperor* a clear example of such?