the discrete charm of paul wolfowitz: an official portrait

[thebigidea]

you know, its disconcerting to stumble on things like this in your files and wonder how they got there...

[Stephanie]

1. With the towers behind him?

And drenched in blood red.

I'm convinced he is the devil.

[Eloriel]

2. Whew! That's a relief

Elsewise I was going to ask: do pit vipers have CHARM?

Eloriel

[thebigidea]

3. speaking of charm...

didn't Maureen Dowd briefly claim that Rumsfeld was charming? Sinatra-like or somesuch?

phew...

[cliss]

4. God. Hideous.

Hideous men. How could so many of them be gathered together in the same administration? In the same country?

And yet, each one of them has a reasonably charismatic exterior. Wolfowitz is eloquent. He has a very good command of words. I've heard him speak. He seems reasonable, he makes sense.....up to a point.

And then you look a little closer. And you see...

[thebigidea]

5. there's one dreamboat, though

be still my beating heart. Oh wait, that isn't lust. Its HORROR!

[DemBones DemBones]

6. Another disconcerting thing about Wolfowitz and many of his neocon

chums is that they follow the philosophical teachings of Leo Strauss. Some of them were Strauss's students at the University of Chicago but obviously that was all some time ago. Strauss has been dead thirty years so he hasn't inspired them in person recently. Most people MOVE ON after college and do not believe the same things they believed in college, fifty years down the road.

Besides that, Strauss taught some creepy stuff. He taught that leaders had the right to deceive the public and that leaders should use religion and nationalism to control the public. I'm still trying to imagine these geeks being in college and deciding "Oh, wow, Professor Strauss says we can be evil as we wanna be!"

Here's a short article with more details on "Straussian thought":

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15935