Let me get this straight. Robert Gates, the Secretary-Of-Defense-For-Life, is touring the TV news shows and major newspapers pleading with great angst lines in his forehead that WikiLeaks is "guilty" and "morally culpable" for releasing 75,000 field reports from Afghanistan to the American public because they endanger Afghans allied with US forces.
But he and the US militarists who initiated the war in Iraq and who have continued the war in Afghanistan for nine years, the people who keep everything about these wars secret except what is useful to sustain them, the people who finance these wars on credit without raising taxes, dumping the costs on future generations these people are not "morally culpable," "guilty" or endangering anyone?
Do I have that right?
In other words, to reveal information about the war makes one morally guilty of endangering people, while being responsible for the war itself does not.
You have to give a man like Gates credit. He has a pleasant, nice guy manner and earns his salary by being able to lie like a dog with a straight face and if it's necessary, even show a modicum of passion on cue.
The playwright Arthur Miller wrote a great little book called On Politics and the Art of Acting, in which he shows that Ronald Reagan was not the only actor in Washington, that in fact acting is an indispensable talent for modern US political leadership -- especially in this moment in our history when the ability to deny reality is so critical.
"Perhaps it needs to be said," Miller writes, "that as a general rule, an axiom if you will, the closer one approaches any kind of power the more acting is required."
When he was interviewed by ABC's Christiane Amanpour, Gates was in full thespian mode. He said this:
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